The CRA add-on is true, but it doesn't appear to have been at the insistence of President Clinton. The CRA provision was actually a "trade-off" between the majority Republicans who wanted the repeal of Glass-Steagall very badly and the minority Democrats who held out for the enhancement to CRA. The timeline of the bill was as follows...

- The legislation was introduced in the U.S. Senate by Phil Gramm (R-Texas) and in the U.S. House of Representatives by Jim Leach (R-Iowa).

- The Senate passed the bill by a 54-44 vote along party lines (53 Republicans and one Democrat in favor; 44 Democrats opposed). The House passed a different version of the bill on an uncontested and uncounted voice vote.

- The House passed a different version of the bill. When the two chambers could not agree on a joint version of the bill in conference, the House voted by a vote of 241-132 (R 58-131; D 182-1) to instruct its negotiators to work for a law which ensured that consumers enjoyed "robust competition and equal and non-discriminatory access to financial services and economic opportunities in their communities" (i.e., protection against exclusionary redlining)

- In the conference committee, Democrats agreed to support the bill after Republicans agreed to reassert provisions of the anti-redlining Community Reinvestment Act.

- The final bill resolving the differences was passed by the Senate 90-8 and by the House 362-57. The legislation was signed into law by Democratic President Bill Clinton on November 12, 1999.

There are also some interesting facts about Senator Gramm...

- He was a Democrat for 41 years before switching to the Republican party when both the White House and the Congress came under control of the Republicans when Ronald Reagan was elected.

- When Reagan was elected president, Gramm—the brain behind the conservative "Boll Weevil" Democrats—allied with the new President to chop the (non-military) budget and cut taxes. In 1983, Democrats enraged with Gramm's treachery booted him from the House Budget Committee. Gramm quit the Democrats, resigned his seat, joined the GOP, and won his seat back in a special election.

- He was known as a heartless and brutal politician, relentlessly seeking his own agenda. He was quoted as telling a critic of his ruthless politics, "People say I don't have a heart. I do. I keep it in a quart jar on my desk."

- While he railed publicly against corporate interests, the record shows that he quietly became one of the biggest recipients of campaign contributions from energy, banking, health-care, and insurance companies.

- With regard to the CRA and red-lining, during a 2001 Senate debate over a measure to curb predatory lending he argued, "What some view as exploitive, I see as a gift. Some people look at subprime lending and see evil. I look at subprime lending and I see the American dream in action.”

- Immediately upon retiring from the Senate, he accepted a job as Vice Chairman of UBS, the giant Swiss bank, a post he still holds today. UBS was reported to be one of Gramm's largest political contributors while he was in the Senate. UBS also benefitted significantly from the repeal of Glass-Steagall, permitting them to enter the U.S. market in both banking and investment banking.

- Gramm's wife, Wendy, served as a director of Enron until it imploded as the result of the trading of commodity-based derivatives and false reporting of income.
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I guess we can all see why Senator Gramm has been voted by several sources (TIME, CNN, Slate, etc.) as among those responsible for the financial meltdown we are now experiencing. It seems to me that he was at least as responsible as Barney Frank, who has been taking most of the heat here lately. Maybe moreso.