Judd Gregg; Republican-Heretic????

[Mr. Shaman]

Whew!!

I hope he has a bodyguard that recognizes all Republican-congressmen!!! (...Especially the ones known to carry weapons.)​

"Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, said in a television interview that the need for financial regulation was so widely recognized in Congress that he believes lawmakers will produce a bipartisan measure.

"There's a lot of common ground here. This really isn't a partisan issue," Gregg told CNBC. "This is an extremely complex exercise in getting governance right and the only really big philosophical difference here is how you protect consumers."

"These negotiations are going forward," he added. "My guess is that at the end of the day the Senate will have a fairly substantive, basically bipartisan product. But how we get there is not absolutely clear."

Just six days earlier, Dodd had said he hit an impasse with Senator Richard Shelby, the committee's top Republican, in talks that have dragged on for more than a year over tightening oversight of banks and capital markets.

The Dodd-Shelby talks were torpedoed by one of Obama's key proposals -- creating an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency to regulate mortgages and credit cards.

Republicans want consumer protection melded with efforts to maintain the soundness of the financial system, fearing that a free-standing consumer agency would be a powerful vehicle for interests hostile to Wall Street.

In a statement late on Thursday, Corker called creation of the consumer protection agency the debate's hot-button issue and said he and Dodd agreed to set that topic aside "for now."

But Gregg said he opposed any negotiating approach that would separate consumer protection from needs to curb reckless banking practices.

"That's going to be politically an untenable position," he told CNBC. "Our ability to get the consumer protection right means that it really needs to be merged into the entire process of negotiating the regulatory reform. I don't think you can separate the two."