Back in the day, perhaps even today, Wall Street banks could go shopping around for credit agencies to rate their bonds – too often, it turns out, the same financial products that were backed by crappy home mortgages with little hope of ever being repaid.

The result, in a nutshell, was the great financial meltdown of 2008. Congress is now getting around to addressing the situation in a sweeping Wall Street reform bill.

This week, Minnesota's two U.S. senators are rolling out proposals that get at different aspects of the problem. An amendment introduced by Democrat Amy Klobuchar today would go after the predatory lending practices that helped usher in the housing market's long downward slide. Based on a Minnesota law, the measure would require lenders or mortgage brokers to actually verify borrowers' ability to pay back loans. That would mean doing things more like they used to in the olden days, like verifying income and financial resources with tax returns, pay stubs, bank records and the like.

Meanwhile, fellow Democrat Al Franken rolled out an amendment last night to address conflicts of interest in Wall Street's credit rating system. It would limit investment bank's ability to shop around for the best ratings for their financial products, a process highlighted in Michael Lewis' current bestseller "The Big Short," which pegs the practice to a big part of the financial meltdown.

The problem, as Lewis and many others conceived it, was that rating agencies all too often gave out undeserved AAA ratings to attract more business. The solution, as Franken conceives it, is to create a Credit Rating Advisory Board that would determine which credit rating agency would give a financial institution the initial rating for their bond (or other financial product).

As Franken explained it to the Senate Tuesday: "In the current system, the issuer of the bond pays the credit rating agency. And so, there's an incentive to rate every product that comes across your desk as 'AAA.' If you give a risky product a low rating, the issuer can just go to one of the other agencies and shop around for a better rating. And guess which agency that issuer is going to go back to next time? Of course, the agency that gave them the highest rating. Does anyone see a problem here? . . . I do." Now it remains to be seen if the Senate does too.