Obama vows to veto any spending bill that rolls back Dodd-Frank: ‘We’ve worked too hard to recover’

President Obama on Saturday threatened to veto any legislation that weakens the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or undoes any other piece of Wall Street reform.

Mr. Obama said the Dodd-Frank reform package — meant to protect consumers, end the era of “too big to fail” banks and take other steps to prevent a financial meltdown like the one seen in 2008 — is now central to the U.S. economy. He accused Republicans of doing the bidding of Wall Street with their latest attempt to dismantle the system.

“As long as I’m president, I’m going to keep doing whatever I can to protect consumers, and our entire economy from the kind of irresponsibility that led to the Great Recession in the first place,” the president said in his weekly address.

“None of this has been easy. We’ve had to overcome fierce lobbying campaigns from the special interests and their allies in Congress. In fact, they’re still trying everything to attack everything this reform accomplishes — from hiding rollbacks of key protections in unrelated bills, to blocking the financial cops on the beat from doing their job. And they continue to claim this Wall Street reform is somehow bad for business … We can’t put the security of families at risk by returning to the days when big banks or bad actors were allowed to write their own rules. And if any bill comes to my desk that tries to unravel the new rules on Wall Street, I will veto it. We’ve worked too hard to recover from one crisis only to risk another.”

Mr. Obama’s comments come as key Republicans move legislation that would undo parts of the controversial Dodd-Frank financial reform package. Sen. Richard Shelby, Alabama Republican and chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, is pushing a bill that would lessen what he calls the federal government’s “one-size-fits-all” method of regulating major banks. Supporters say the legislation would benefit consumers and strengthen the U.S. economy.

Republicans are aiming to attach the Wall Street reforms to a broader spending bill. That strategy could raise the likelihood of a government shutdown if Mr. Obama does, in fact, veto the larger spending bill and a compromise isn’t found by the end of the fiscal year.

The fiscal year ends Sept. 30.

Mr. Shelby argues the legislation, known as the Financial Regulatory Improvement Act, is necessary to protect consumers, small banks and others who had little to do with the 2008 financial crisis.

“Legislation claiming to end too-big-to-fail and to address the root causes of the crisis has done just the opposite. Instead of reducing systemic risk, Dodd-Frank has actually encouraged the biggest banks to become larger and more concentrated,” Mr. Shelby said during a speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation this week. “It has put in place a structure where Main Street banks and other financial companies that had nothing to do with the crisis are treated as if they caused it … By comparison, the Financial Regulatory Improvement Act directs regulators to analyze the systemic risk posed by each bank above $50 billion and regulate it based on the bank’s individual risk profile. More importantly, it incentivizes financial institutions to reduce risk by giving them a path to shed this designation.I believe that less systemic risk is a good thing. That does not mean, however, that we should have a system devoid of risk.”