NTU President Pete Sepp issued the following statement on the CHOICE Act:
"Thanks to committee passage of the Financial CHOICE Act, the full House of Representatives now has an opportunity to advance genuine reforms that will protect taxpayers, empower consumers, boost small businesses, and free our economy from the disastrous Dodd-Frank law.
But if Congress is to ensure that the CHOICE Act fully lives up to its name, then the legislation must include repeal of the Durbin Amendment price controls. Nearly six miserable years of experience have shown that this amendment, which sanctioned government interference with debit card transactions, has deprived customers of the benefits they wanted and enriched politically-connected large retailers. This is precisely the outcome that taxpayer advocates like NTU warned about when the Durbin Amendment was enacted.
Washington must now fix the mistake it made in 2010, when it put the clumsy thumb of big government on the scales of the debit card marketplace and forced consumers to suffer the consequences. Conscientious public officials must face facts now and resist the scare tactics of those who want to preserve the unfair status quo. Allowing the Durbin Amendment to stand in place means consumers, and our economy, will fall further behind. That's why NTU's 2017 scorecard will consider Durbin Amendment repeal to be a critical pro-taxpayer vote."