By Ylan Q. Mui and Brady Dennis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 10, 2010; A11

John Blum knows there's more money at stake for the big banks in the heated debate over the financial overhaul bill than for his relatively tiny 200,000-member credit union in Virginia Beach.

But on Wednesday, Blum joined forces with some of the country's smallest financial institutions to protest a "swipe fee" amendment for credit and debit cards that they called discriminatory, arbitrary and anti-consumer. Credit union members have submitted 375,000 e-mails, letters and phone calls over the past two weeks, and about a thousand credit union executives are swarming Capitol Hill this week in hopes of cutting it from the final version of the bill.

"I have a very small piece" of the pie, said Blum, vice president of operations for Chartway Federal Credit Union. "That doesn't mean I'm not going to fight."

On Thursday, lawmakers will begin the process of reconciling the versions of the bill passed by the House and Senate. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi late Tuesday appointed 10 Democrats, all members of the Financial Services Committee, to serve as conferees. Republicans appointed six of their members from the same committee. In addition, lawmakers from a handful of other committees, such as agriculture, judiciary and small business, will participate as conferees on specific portions of the legislation over which their committees have jurisdiction.

Although President Obama has repeatedly called out Wall Street for trying to defeat or scale back far-reaching new financial rules, the reality is more complicated. For all of Wall Street's money and power, it has been a different army of lobbyists that has proven most effective over the past year in shaping the financial overhaul legislation on Capitol Hill. Again and again, big banks have been outpaced by small-town interests, proving that even when it comes to overhauling financial regulation, politics really is local.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...060905907.html