The U.S. Senate has begun debate on a high-profile bill that Virginia's junior senator helped write.

Sen. Mark Warner, who sits on the Senate Banking Committee, has worked for months on parts of the Senate's financial overhaul bill, which was introduced by Sen. Chris Dodd in March.

The bill's components are in flux, but the Democrats hope to pass something that will impose stricter controls on Wall Street, provide regulators a way to step in earlier if problems arise, and generally stave off the bailouts given to big, failing financial firms during this recession.

Warner's years of experience in business--he made millions investing in the cell phone industry--helped get him involved in work to craft the bill months ago. He has been working regularly for about a year with Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee on aspects of the legislation.

Senate Republicans don't like some parts of what Democrats proposed, and stalled debate earlier before relenting this week.

Floor work on the bill is expected to last several days, if not weeks, but Warner calls it "a step forward" and hopes the final product will be "a good centrist" package.

"There's a place to get common ground here," Warner said in a telephone interview last week. "My hope is we should get to a bill that can get 70 votes and get a centrist bill. The problem will be to make sure it doesn't get pulled too far to the left and too far to the right."

He said that while there are disagreements among senators about financial reform, it isn't the polarizing opposition that came with health care reform.

Warner said the bill would require bank regulators to communicate with each other and give them more tools to oversee financial firms. It would require banks to keep more capital, do less leveraging, and write plans for how they'd go out of business in the case of another meltdown.

"They have to write their own funeral plan," he said.

The way Warner describes it, the bill is largely meant to stave off big bank collapses, like that of Lehman Brothers, or at least mitigate the fallout to other banking institutions by taking apart a failed firm slowly.

Bankruptcy would be preferred, Warner said, but the bill creates a plan, called "resolution," for how to close a company if necessary without bailing it out with taxpayer money.

"Hopefully if we've done this bill right, it will rarely if ever be used," Warner said. "We want to make sure we never again prop them up."

Despite 20 years in business, Warner said, financial reform is so complicated that "I've spent 15 months trying to get up to speed."

Working on the bill has helped the former Virginia governor find his place among 100 senators, he said.

"Now I feel a bit more in the mix," said Warner, who was elected in 2008.

He said it took him about a year to figure out how to be governor, and it took him about a year to figure out how to be a senator.

"There were times during the first year when I may have bit my tongue," Warner said. "I'm not going to do that anymore. If I make people in both parties mad sometimes, so be it."