Following the law is for chumps, the banks might say. When industry complains about the dreaded class action lawsuits (which have not yet been raised) they always skip around situations like this, where they are in violation of the law but don’t really care. They collection millions, perhaps even billions and it’s not as though they’re going to cut their own bonus plans when there are millions of people out there who will pony up extra fees without even knowing about it. During the GOP Congress and Bush years, it’s not as though anyone ever asked big business to follow the rule of law or think about consumers.

It would be great if Democrats in Congress can make progress on this issue but realistically, the banks are in one of their worst down turns in decades and are looking for every cent under every stone so it would be surprising to see them fall in line just by asking. Is it really so difficult for business to follow the laws they helped write in the first place? If regulators go too far (which I doubt they would, even if they wanted to) it will all come back to industry stonewalling previous attempts to be reasonable.