After more than a year of drafts, rewrites, and debate, the U.S. Senate voted 60 to 39 on Thursday afternoon to approve sweeping new legislation to overhaul the nation’s financial regulatory system.

It took senators two weeks to round up enough votes for passage since the House approved the bill on July 1. President Obama now just needs to ink his name to the more than 2,300 pages of new rules and regulatory structures, which address a broad scope of financial market issues, from mortgage lending to “too big to fail” institutions.

Nancy Zirkin is EVP of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. Commenting on the legislation’s passage, she said, “For decades, Wall Street has operated like a casino for the benefit of a greedy few, and Main Street paid the price. The Dodd-Frank bill will inject a much needed dose of sanity into our financial system and includes a number of common sense provisions that civil rights, consumer, and labor advocates have sought for years to protect consumers, homebuyers, and small businesses.”

Among the bill’s central provisions is the creation of a new independent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

within the Federal Reserve to oversee and set new rules for mortgages and other consumer-facing credit products.

It also creates a new Financial Stability Council, tasked with identifying systemic risks posed by large companies before their insolvency threatens overall economic stability, such as was the case when Lehman Brothers toppled in 2008. It gives the government the authority to take control of and wind down complex, troubled financial firms before they pull the rest of the country into another crisis.

It places tighter regulations on hedge funds and institutional trading, and sets new rules for the vastly obscure $600 trillion derivatives market.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, whose agency will be tasked with implementing much of the new laws, said, “The financial reform legislation approved by the Congress today represents a welcome and far-reaching step toward preventing a replay of the recent financial crisis.”

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner commented in a statement to the press that the reform legislation embraces the guiding principles that Obama has been fighting for since before he was elected president.

“Today, the members of Congress who voted for reform stood with the millions of Americans who lost their jobs, their homes, their businesses, and their savings as a result of this crisis,” Geithner said in a statement to the press.

“This is the beginning, not the end, of the process of financial reform,” Geithner added.

President Obama is expected to sign the landmark legislation into law by the end of next week. A recent article by the Washington Post said administration officials and federal regulators have already quietly begun laying the groundwork to implement the reform measures.