Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) just spoke to home-state voters about his sudden emergence as the scapegoat for the watering-down of his executive pay amendment to the stimulus bill — and the Banking Committee chairman was openly angry with the Treasury Department for not owning up to its role in the flap earlier this week.
Dodd defended his role in ensuring that Wall Street compensation limits made it into the stimulus. The senator expressed disappointment that Treasury let him twist in the wind until yesterday evening, when Secretary Tim Geithner admitted that officials from his department requested that Dodd’s amendment be changed to grandfather in existing bonus contracts.
We’ll have the video of Dodd’s comments for you soon, but here’s his key quote:
I wouldn’t go around and change my own amendment within days of that if I didn’t think it was merely technical in nature.
And so I’m angry about it and angry that, in a sense, I’ve been held up as sort of responsible for all of this, when, in fact, I responded to what I thought was a reasonable request at the time [from Treasury] … it turned out to be far more than that.
But this back-and-forth over the executive pay amendment isn’t the only issue that could put Dodd at odds with Geithner and White House economic adviser Larry Summers.
As I mentioned earlier today, Dodd has been openly skeptical of consolidating future financial regulatory power at the Federal Reserve, preferring to run broader regulation out of the FDIC — and that position may not sit well with Geithner, the former head of the New York Fed, as well as Summers, who is widely tipped to be the next Fed chairman.
Late Update: Here’s the video of Dodd.
