WASHINGTON DC, United States – President Barack Obama’s financial overhaul law is nearly a year old. For congressional Republicans, the fight to weaken it is just starting.

Wary of trying to repeal the entire statute and being portrayed as Wall Street’s protectors — banks rank among the country’s least popular institutions — Republican lawmakers are trying to nibble away at the behemoth measure. It’s a crusade they’ve waged all year, despite lacking the White House and Senate control they need to prevail.

Days ago, one Republican-run House committee approved bills diluting parts of the law requiring reports on corporate salaries and exempting some investment advisers from registering with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Another House panel voted to slice US$200 million from Obama’s US$1.4 billion budget request for the SEC, which has a major enforcement role.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are continuing a procedural blockade that has helped prevent Obama from putting Elizabeth Warren or anyone else in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which opens its doors in two weeks.

Republicans say the overhaul went too far and has saddled banks and other companies with requirements that harm their competitiveness.

The law hurts “the formation of capital, the cost of capital and access to capital, and you can’t have capitalism without capital,” said Republican Rep Jeb Hensarling, a leader of the House Financial Services Committee. “So Republicans in the House will be examining each and every one of the 2,000-plus pages” of the law, which he called “a job creator’s nightmare.”

Confident that Obama and the Democratic-controlled Senate can prevent the House from doing major damage, Democrats view the Republican drive as a political exercise — for now.

“It’s mostly setting a marker for the election. And it helps with their campaign contributions,” said Rep Barney Frank, a Democrat who chaired the Financial Services Committee last year and was a chief author of the law. “But it also tells people in the financial community that if they win the next election, they’ll be able to undo it all.”

The financial industry leans Republican in its campaign contributions but not overwhelmingly. Sixty-one per cent of the US$9 million that commercial banks gave federal candidates for the 2010 elections went to Republicans, while 54 per cent of the securities and investment industry’s US$9 million went to Democrats, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Obama signed the banking and consumer protection measure last July 21, a keystone achievement that responded to the biggest financial crisis and most severe recession since the 1930s. It passed Congress with solid Democratic support and near-uniform Republican opposition.

Among its provisions, the law created the consumer protection agency to oversee mortgages, credit cards and other financial products, and curbed the trading of derivatives, speculative investments partly blamed for the 2008 financial crisis. It also increased oversight and required banks to hold back money for protection against losses.