Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) have introduced legislation that would make permanent two tax credits aimed at reducing poverty and helping low-income and working families. Two dozen other lawmakers have signed onto the legislation, which would also expand eligibility for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit, which were originally expanded by the 2009 stimulus law and were extended temporarily by the deal to avert the fiscal cliff in January.

The tax credits have received bipartisan support in the past, a point Brown and Durbin made in a release announcing the legislation, The Hill reports:

“Enhancing the earned income tax credit should be a bipartisan goal, as President Reagan called EITC the most effective tool in fighting poverty,” Brown said in a statement. “We need to reward Americans who work hard and play by the rules and ensure that they can work and continue to take care of their families.”

“This bill is pro-family, pro-work legislation that would permanently extend critical refundable tax credit provisions that have helped lift millions of working families out of poverty,” Durbin added.

Combined, the EITC and child credit kept 9.4 million people out of poverty in 2011, according to data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Nearly 5 million of those were children, and the stimulus expansion kept 1.5 million more out of poverty than the original credits would have. Since then, though, Republicans in Congress have sought to roll back those extensions in different tax plans put forth in the House and Senate.

That would be a mistake, since the tax credits don’t just keep families out of poverty — they also increase future earnings for children who benefit from them, according to CBPP. Brown and Durbin’s legislation would ensure that more families — and more children — would be able to take advantage of those benefits in the future.

Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) and Louisiana Sen. David Vitter (R) Wednesday introduced legislation aimed at reining in “too big to fail” megabanks by imposing strict capital requirements and preventing them from structuring themselves to elude existing regulations.

The largest Wall Street banks are even bigger today than they were before the crisis, Brown noted in a floor speech in February when he renewed calls to break up large banks. In a new video explaining why he and Vitter introduced the legislation, Brown said the industry hasn’t learned its lesson from the crisis and that taxpayers shouldn’t be on the hook for banks’ risky practices again as they were when the financial system nearly collapsed in 2008:

BROWN: Did we learn our lesson after taxpayers had to bailout the megabanks in 2008? Well, since then, our banking industry has become even more — not less — consolidated. Ten large financial institutions merged into just four. These four behemoths are nearly $2 trillion dollars…larger than they were the last time we determined they were “too big to fail.” This growth didn’t come from innovative new products and services…it was built by the perception that these banks aren’t just backed by their investors, they’re also, unfortunately, backed by every American taxpayer.

Watch it:

The Brown-Vitter legislation would rein in banks by increasing capital standards — that is, the amount of money they have to keep on hand to manage the risk they take through investments and lending. The largest banks, those with more than $500 billion in assets, would be subject to a 15 percent capital requirement. That provision, which would apply to JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, and Bank of America, would force large banks to either hold more money to cover their risks or to reduce in size to avoid the capital requirements. Those standards are even stronger than the Basel III requirements sought by international regulators.

The legislation would also limit the taxpayer guarantee to traditional banking practices, leaving banks to rely on their own capital to insure the riskier practices in which they engage. That, Brown said, would prevent taxpayers from subsidizing the riskiest lending and trading practices that helped spark the financial crisis. “If megabanks want to be large and complex, that’s their choice,” Brown said. “But taxpayers shouldn’t have to subsidize their risk-taking.”

Amid rising concerns about large banks from senators, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Tuesday that “too big to fail” banks still pose a major risk to the American economy. Massachusetts Sen. Elizatbeth Warren (D) grilled Bernanke over the persistence of Too Big To Fail institutions during a Senate hearing last week, and at a press conference yesterday, Bernanke made it clear that he agrees with Warren that such banks are still a “major issue” that need to be addressed:

BERNANKE: I certainly never meant to say to Senator Warren, and I share her concern about Too Big To Fail, it’s a major issue. I never meant to imply that the problem was solved and gone. It is not solved and gone. … I hope that we’ll make progress against Too Big To Fail, because I agree with her 100 percent that it’s a real problem and needs to be addressed if at all possible.

Warren’s reputation as a critic of Wall Street followed her to the Senate, where she has questioned regulators over bank prosecutions and whether large financial institutions were “too big for trial.” But Warren isn’t alone: Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) and Louisiana Sen. David Vitter (R) are prepping legislation to reduce the size of large banks, and Brown and Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley (R) have also pressed regulators and the Justice Dept. over the lack of prosecutions that creates the perception that banks have a “get out of jail free” card.

The largest banks, as this chart Brown displayed on the Senate floor last month shows, have only grown larger since the financial crisis:

The key focus for Bernanke right now, he said, was ensuring that rules included in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act and other international guidelines meant to reduce the risk of Too Big To Fail banks were instituted properly.

Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) took the Senate floor today to argue against Wall Street mega-banks that have been deemed “too big to fail” and thus receive the implicit backing of the federal government, arguing that lawmakers should act immediately to break up the big banks that now have assets worth more than three-fifths of the American economy.

Wall Street banks sparked the financial crisis in 2008 and were rescued by the federal government. Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act in 2010, but many of its rules have yet to take effect and banks are even bigger today than they were before the crisis. They are also just as scandalous, as financial institutions have faced lawsuits over mortgage and foreclosure fraud, money laundering, interest rate-rigging, and other practices. That, Brown said Thursday, should drive lawmakers to learn from past mistakes and break up the big banks to protect the health of the American economy:

BROWN: In the last five years alone we have seen faulty mortgage-related securities; foreclosure fraud; big losses from risky trading; money laundering; and Libor rate rigging. [...]

How many more scandals will it take before we acknowledge that we can’t rely on regulators to prevent subprime lending, dangerous derivatives, risky proprietary trading, and even fraud and manipulation?

Wall Street has been allowed to run wild for years. We simply cannot wait any longer for regulators to act. These institutions are too big to manage, they are too big to regulate, and they are surely still too big to fail.

Watch it:

Two decades ago, the six largest Wall Street banks held assets worth just 16 percent of the American economy, Brown said. They now hold assets worth more than 60 percent of the total economy:

Brown has emerged as a leading critic of Too Big To Fail in the Senate, and his efforts have attracted bipartisan support. Louisiana Sen. David Vitter (R) joined Brown’s call for action on the Senate floor today, and Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley (R) has ripped big banks for holding a “get out of jail free card” and, with Brown, has urged the Department of Justice to prosecute large banks for fraudulent practices.

A bipartisan duo of senators sent a letter to the Department of Justice today to press Attorney General Eric Holder on the lack of prosecutions for employees and executives of the nation’s largest banks in the wake of financial crisis. The letter from Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) questioned Holder about “whether the ‘too big to fail’ status of certain Wall Street megabanks undermines the ability of the federal government to prosecute wrongdoing and impose appropriate penalties.”

“Wall Street megabanks aren’t just too big to fail, they’re increasingly too big to jail,” Brown said in a release. “Already, the nation’s six largest megabanks enjoy what amounts to taxpayer-funded guarantee by virtue of their size, making it harder for regional and community banks to compete. Now, these megabanks may also enjoy some impunity when they violate the law by laundering money or illegally foreclosing on homeowners. Wall Street should pay the full price of its wrongdoing, not pass the costs along to taxpayers.”

“Unfortunately, we’ve seen little willingness to charge these individuals criminally,” Grassley added. “The public deserves an explanation of how the Justice Department arrives at these decisions.”

Last month, Grassley criticized the “get out of jail free card” that has been given to the nation’s largest financial institutions, which have largely avoided serious prosecution since the financial crisis. Prosecutions for financial fraud hit a 20-year low in 2011. Many of the fines the banks have paid are tax-deductible, a problem Brown is currently seeking to remedy.

“Unfortunately, many of the settlements between large financial institutions and the federal government involve penalties that are disproportionately low, both in relation to the profits which resulted from those wrongful actions as well as in relation to the costs imposed upon consumers, investors, and the market,” Grassley and Brown wrote in the letter, adding that the perception that large banks are too big to face real prosecution “undermines the public’s confidence in our institutions and in the principal that the law is applied equally in all cases.”

The ill-advised trade that recently cost JP Morgan Chase billions of dollars has refocused some of the federal government’s attention back on Wall Street and the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. The White House has said that it will push harder to implement a robust version of the Volcker Rule, which is meant to rein in banks’ risky trading.

ThinkProgress spoke today with one of the foremost financial reform advocates in Congress, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH). Brown said that JP Morgan’s trading mess proves banks are not only too big to fail — meaning they are explicitly backed by the government and will be rescued if they blow themselves up — but simply “too big to manage”:

Q: What’s your takeaway from JP Morgan Chase and their trading mess, particularly given that [CEO Jamie] Dimon was one of the most vocal critics of Dodd-Frank?

BROWN: That these banks are not just too big to fail, they’re too big to manage. Jamie Dimon’s smart, he’s articulate, he’s probably a good manager, he’s probably a good CEO. I don’t like his public persona in terms of what he’s done to weaken these regulations and to undercut them. They lost their fights in Congress, now they’re organizing to win them in the regulatory agencies. But I think, if he can’t manage a bank this size, it probably isn’t manageable. I think these banks will be stronger and healthier and probably more profitable if they’re smaller.

Watch it:

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker — whose names graces the Volcker Rule — made the same point yesterday, saying, “Maybe this JPMorgan thing is an illustration that these (banks) are really too big to manage…There are so many things going on at these banks.” Brown recently reintroduced legislation that would force the six biggest banks in the nation to shrink. The bill was rejected in 2010 during the debate over Dodd-Frank, but Brown recently told the Financial Times that he feels more optimistic about its chances now.