On the recordJune 8, 2011
let me take a moment here to clarify for my colleagues the intent of this amendment. Not surprisingly, a number of groups have made a number of claims about what this amendment ``is'' and ``is not.'' In drafting any regulations required by the amendment, any agencies involved are required to not only abide by the letter of the law but also the congressional intent of its authors. Let me take a minute to try to make crystal clear what exactly the intent of this amendment is. First of all, let me address some of the claims that have been made about the implementation date of debit interchange regulations. My amendment would direct the Fed to implement these provisions on a date of their determination. Why was this language included in this way? The intent of this language is to provide the Fed with the discretion to implement these regulations as quickly as is practically possible for merchants, issuers and networks to prepare for such new regulations. The hope with this language would be to avoid the situation we are in right now where parties impacted by these changes would likely have less than a month to implement significant changes to the debit interchange system. To be clear, the Fed may not disregard implementation of debit interchange regulation, as some have articulated. They also may not arbitrarily decide to implement these rules 5 years from now.…
