With Sen. Roger Marshall voted out and Sen. Dick Durbin retiring, the Credit Card Competition Act faces an uncertain future.

The ‘blue wave’ of Democrat victories in Congress this week washed Republican Sen. Roger Marshall out of office, tapering his support for the Credit Card Competition Act.

Sen. Dick Durbin, the Democrat who has been his partner in the push to pass that bill aimed at lowering card swipe fees for merchants, has already said he’s retiring at the end of this term.

That means that at the start of a new Congress next year, the bill won’t have its two biggest co-sponsors of the past few years in the Senate. That could make a meaningful difference for a piece of legislation that has struggled to win passage since Durbin and Marshall first introduced the legislation in 2022.

The bill, which takes aim at Visa and Mastercard, would force banks that issue credit cards to ensure that an alternative card network, other than those two dominant players, was available to process a transaction. The idea is to create more competition in the card network market in a bid to lower fees that merchants are charged for processing cards.

CCCA proponent Doug Kantor, who has long worked on behalf of merchants as general counsel for the National Association of Convenience Stores, called it “painful” to lose Marshall’s support of the legislation.

But Kantor noted in an interview Wednesday that Marshall has helped win more support of the bill in this congressional session, including from President Donald Trump.

Source link