Other changes make life much easier for the largest players and encourage regulatory shenanigans. Dodd-Frank introduced more “stress tests” — fire-drill-like exercises that ensure the banks can handle a major downturn. The Crapo bill reduces their frequency for all the major players’ internal tests, from Citigroup to JPMorgan Chase on down.

The Crapo bill will introduce a one-word change from “may” to “shall” that will pave the way for the biggest, most politically connected financial firms to argue that regulations should be tailored to be weaker for themselves, creating a race-to-the-bottom dynamic in what has been, so far, fair rules written for all banks to follow together. It allows community banks to violate the Volcker Rule, introduced in Dodd-Frank to prevent banks from engaging in hedge-fund-like gambling with their own funds.

Foreign banks that pose major risks, such as the Trump-friendly Deutsche Bank, will see their United States subsidiaries deregulated with the bill. It attacks the supplemental leverage ratio — an essential reform that provides a clear, straightforward funding rule to ensure banks are stable — by watering it down for two of the largest eight banks. Reporting shows other large banks like Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase are fighting to expand this further. This starts the rule down a path of not being informative or useful for regulators and capital markets. This is why the Congressional Budget Office not only assumes that it is 50 percent likely these megabanks will abuse this loophole, but also that this bill increases the chance and cost of a financial crisis overall. Given the sheer opportunity to abuse porous rules introduced by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, it is overkill to give finance even more rules to abuse for its own profit.

Moderate Democrats could fight for a narrower bill that would benefit small banks — with the understanding that community banks aren’t actually suffering. According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, community banks had $6 billion in profits in the fall of 2017, a rise of 9.4 percent over the previous year. Furthermore, since Dodd-Frank, several waves of deregulation bills for small banks have already passed.

Communities must have banks that can meet their needs. By rolling back requirements for medium-size banks, the Crapo proposal will accelerate mergers and consolidations rather than postpone them. This could cause even fewer community banks and more concentration in the long run. If we are concerned about a top-heavy financial sector, the way to handle that is with breaking up the banks and structural reforms for the biggest players, not by removing basic rules at the bottom.

This bill also hurts consumers. It removes protections on mobile homes and appraisal requirements in rural areas, while getting rid of the requirement that smaller banks prove that borrowers can repay subprime loans they make and keep on their own books. All of these read as if they were written to appease a specific lobbying group, rather than out of a concern for consumer security.