The Senate this month could finally bring closure to two big domestic issues, financial regulation and health care reform, and in the process crown some of the biggest winners and losers in this Congress.

Take the case of JPMorgan Chase. It spent more than $5 million lobbying Congress last year and has already doled out nearly a half-million dollars in campaign donations to curry favor with lawmakers from both parties.

Among the key issues for the Wall Street giant is to kill or substantially revamp President Barack Obama’s proposed bank tax, which could cost the company about $1.5 billion a year — or 38 cents a share, according to an analysis by Sean Ryan at Wisco Research.

“Using tax policy to punish people is a bad idea,” JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon griped after the proposal was unveiled.

The final framework of the tax could be known later this week, when a bipartisan bill is expected to be unveiled in the Senate. But the increasing desire of lawmakers to appease angry voters by inflicting some pain on Wall Street means the betting is against the banks.

In fact, the intense emotional swings of voters in the past year have created a host of new hurdles for corporate lobbyists this year.

While the House was moving regulatory reform last summer, at a time when the tea partiers were just beginning to have an impact, senior aides for the House Financial Services Committee were openly hostile and essentially declared any representative of the financial industry persona non grata. When the Senate began focusing on the legislation earlier this year, the bankers made a mess of things all by themselves by handing out a new round of record bonuses, rekindling that voter anger and prompting Obama to propose the bank tax.

JPMorgan is hardly alone in dispatching its lobbyists to limit the damage.

Bank of America has spent nearly $4 million on lobbyists and donated more than $650,000 to lawmakers. But it, too, is facing a more than $1 billion annual payout if the bank tax is approved.

Ditto for Citibank, which enjoyed a victory lap after the bailout money was approved and now is looking at an annual cost of about $1.4 billion to help defray its costs.

White House officials dispute such high estimates of the tax but say that even if they are correct, big companies that can afford more than $20 billion in bonuses last year can also pony up the tax payment.

Moreover, the officials said, such a fee will discourage risky behavior in the future, since banks will be on notice that taxpayer bailouts don’t come free.

But Ryan sees more punishment than policy in the tax. He predicts the banks will simply pass on the cost of the new fee to their corporate customers, which quite likely will move it along to consumers when possible.

“You can understand the appeal of trying to craft a tax that exclusively comes out of the hide of bankers and the bank industry. As a practical matter, that is extraordinarily difficult to do, and this doesn’t even come close to it,” he said.

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