Is it time to bury our assets?

On Tuesday, three bills that would gut the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill passed the House Financial Services Committee (HFSC) in decisive fashion, with just six members of the 61-member committee voting against all of them.

The three bills passed over serious objections from the Obama administration. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew wrote a letter to Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), the chairman of the committee, urging "members to oppose these bills and others like [them] that would weaken the important regulatory changes that Wall Street Reform has made to the derivatives market." A year ago, former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner made a similar statement against a slate of nearly identical bills.

Financial reform advocates say that the three bills would do serious damage to parts of Dodd-Frank that deal with derivatives, which are financial products with values based on underlying numbers, like crop prices or interest rates.

Only six of the 28 Democrats on the committee voted against all three of the bills.