Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) gave a new plug for passage of the Credit Card Competition Act last week with an ad that ran during former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s podcast.

While the bill largely languished during the usual August slump in Washington, and the presidential election is distracting from legislation now, he showed he’s not giving up.

If the bill is passed it “would help [end] the grip Visa and Mastercard have,” Marshall says in the Sept. 12 transcript for the ad, which was paid for by the a trade group, the Merchant Payments Coalition. “Every time you use your credit card, they charge you a hidden fee, a swipe fee, and they've been raising it without even telling you.”

That’s the argument that Marshall and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) have been making for about two years as part of a bipartisan effort to crack down on ‘swipe’ fees that merchants are charged every time a consumer swipes, taps or inserts a credit card to pay for a good or service. They’ve argued that Visa and Mastercard, the two biggest U.S. card network companies, are too powerful and should be reined in.

Marshall and Durbin say the legislation would do that by requiring that bank card issuers ensure an alternative network, that isn’t Visa or Mastercard, is available to retailers, restaurants and other merchants for processing credit card payments. They contend that would increase competition.

The latest Marshall spot, reported earlier this week by the Washington outlet Punchbowl News, is part of a larger MPC advertising campaign promoting the bill, said Doug Kantor, an executive committee member for the Merchants Payments Coalition.

“We’re always on a crusade to get it passed — if they were to vote on it today, we’re ready,” Kantor said in an interview Thursday. Still, he acknowledged that legislators’ attention has been divided of late. “Everything this year is up in the air based on elections,” he said.

So far, the bill hasn’t gotten much traction in Congress, with six Senators supporting it and nine House representatives signing on. Durbin introduced the bill in 2022, and reintroduced a largely similar bill last year, winning Republican backing. If it’s not passed this year, it would need to be reintroduced in the new Congress.

Backers of the bill could try to bypass the more traditional route for legislation through committees by attaching it to a larger spending bill, as they did to pass the 2010 Durbin Amendment to the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. That law now caps fees that can be charged on debit card transactions.

Marshall underscored the unpredictability of an election year during a December interview last year with Payments Dive in which he weighed the prospects for passing the legislation this year.

Earlier this year, the CEOs of Visa and Mastercard refused to show up for a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing called by Durbin, who chairs that committee, to discuss their companies’ practices.

On the other side of the battle, the Electronic Payments Coalition, which represents banks and card networks, are equally determined to keep fighting against the legislation. That group argues that Marshall and Durbin are carrying the legislation for big retailers, despite the lawmakers’ talk about benefiting small merchants.

“Sen. Marshall seems to be on a fanatical crusade for corporate mega-stores,” EPC Executive Chairman Richard Hunt said in a Thursday statement.

After Congress breaks for the holidays, there may be a lame duck legislative session at the end of the year during which advocates for the legislation could seek a path to passage, Kantor said. He declined to discuss his contingent’s strategy other than to note there are spending bills to which it could potentially be attached.

By Lynne Marek on Sep 19, 2024
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