What role did Al Franken play in the passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act?

1. Franken’s amendment: a high‑profile push on rating‑agency conflicts

Senator Al Franken pressed a concrete fix to what he and others called the “issuer‑pays” conflict: he proposed that the Securities and Exchange Commission take the job of assigning which registered rating agency would rate a given issuance — a model intended to remove the direct issuer→agency financial link that critics said incentivized inflated ratings ^{[1] [2]}. Franken framed the change as a root cause reform after the financial crisis, arguing rating agencies’ incentives helped produce overly generous ratings on mortgage‑backed securities ^[2].

2. What made it into Dodd‑Frank — study and authority, not immediate adoption

Congress did not adopt Franken’s assigned‑ratings mechanism verbatim into the final Dodd‑Frank Act. Instead, the statute required the SEC to study the assigned‑ratings concept and, if the SEC found conflicts of interest posed a risk, to have authority to implement an alternative mechanism — including Franken’s approach — within a statutory timeframe ^{[3] [5]}. In short, Dodd‑Frank turned Franken’s amendment into a required SEC study and potential rulemaking rather than an immediate overhaul ^[3].

3. Bipartisan echoes and subsequent advocacy

Franken was not alone in continuing to push the issue after enactment: Congressman Brad Sherman credited Franken in the Senate for shepherding the amendment language and has since urged SEC enforcement and implementation of what supporters call the Franken‑Sherman Amendment ^[2]. Franken also worked with at least one Republican senator — Roger Wicker is cited in later efforts — to sustain pressure on the SEC, demonstrating the amendment’s cross‑aisle life beyond the 2010 floor fight ^{[4] [5]}.

4. Implementation lag and critics’ focus on slow action

Multiple reports and advocates have criticized how slowly the SEC moved from study to substantive rules. Minnesota journalism coverage and congressional letters later documented that Dodd‑Frank gave the SEC 270 days to issue rules but that the agency’s follow‑through was delayed, leaving the fundamental issuer‑pays funding model largely intact for years after the law ^{[3] [6]}. Advocates and some lawmakers — including Franken among signatories — complained publicly that the rulemaking process lagged and that the industry’s funding structure remained a problem ^{[6] [3]}.

5. Legal scholarship: limits of the reform and expectations

Academic and legal commentary from the University of Minnesota and other law‑focused outlets highlight that the Franken amendment raised expectations for a structural fix but that congressional compromise and legal constraints produced more modest statutory text and limited reforms in practice. Scholarship documents the gap between the political appeal of assigned ratings and the practical, regulatory and legal hurdles to implementing that model under Dodd‑Frank ^{[7] [5]}.

6. How to interpret Franken’s role: catalyst, not architect of the entire Act

Franken’s role was specific and catalytic: he pressed a targeted reform on credit‑rating agencies that shaped a concrete provision and follow‑on obligations to the SEC, but he was not a principal author of the broad architecture of Dodd‑Frank (e.g., systemic‑risk frameworks, Volcker rule, CFPB creation). The record shows Franken got a named piece of policy attention and statutory language directing the SEC to study and possibly adopt an assigned‑ratings scheme, yet the final law and subsequent practice fell short of the wholesale change he proposed ^{[1] [3] [5]}.

Limitations: available sources in this set document Franken’s amendment, the SEC study/authority outcome, later advocacy and critiques of slow implementation, and law‑school commentary; they do not provide a full roll‑call legislative history of every floor debate or detailed SEC regulatory steps beyond the study/implementation mandate (not found in current reporting) ^{[2] [3] [7]}.