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Democrats Push for Warren to Lead Consumer Agency
WASHINGTON - A group of more than 90 Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives are urging President Obama to appoint Elizabeth Warren as head of the new consumer agency without Senate approval if Republicans threaten to block her nomination.
A group of more than 90 Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives are urging President Obama to appoint Elizabeth Warren as head of the new consumer agency without Senate approval if Republicans threaten to block her nomination. (Reuters) Last month, Senate Republicans said they will block any nominee to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unless changes are made to the agency's structure, which Democrats argue will weaken the new watchdog.
"They would rather hold your appointment hostage and obstruct the process than make sure consumers have a strong advocate on their side," reads a letter that will be sent to President Obama on Thursday.
The head of the agency is subject to confirmation by the Senate but the president can appoint someone to the job for a limited time if he does so while the Senate is on a recess.
"If Republicans in the Senate indeed refuse to consider her, we request that you use your constitutional authority to make her a recess appointment," reads the letter, spearheaded by Democratic representatives Carolyn Maloney, Brad Miller and Keith Ellison.
Warren is credited with conceiving the idea for the agency, which will regulate products like credit cards and mortgages, and is currently setting it up as an adviser to President Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. The bureau opens its doors on July 21.
The Harvard law school professor is a hero to liberals and consumer advocates but has drawn the ire of Republicans and many bankers for her outspoken criticism of the lending industry.
Republicans and the banking industry oppose the agency arguing it will have too much power and could restrict credit and the type of financial products that can be offered.
Warren has been trying to quell these fears but has met with limited success. House Republicans have held hearings highlighting their concerns about the bureau and have also taken aim at Warren's role in negotiations that state governments and some federal agencies are having with banks over mortgage servicing practices.
If Warren was appointed during a Senate recess, she could only serve in the job until the end of next year rather than the five-year term specified in the Dodd-Frank financial oversight law.
Republicans can use procedural maneuvers, however, to try to prevent a recess appointment by standing in the way of the Senate going on a break.
Senate Democrats decided to technically keep the Senate in session this week rather than break for a week after Republicans threatened to use such a ploy.
(Reporting by Dave Clarke; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)
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15 Comments so far
Show Allfew modern topics are as inherently stupid and pointless as Warren vs. Wall Street, unless, perhaps, it might be Democrats vs. Republicans...
how's Fukushima today? how's my milk? who would tell?
If the President had any creative juice or just plain guts, he might simply nominate Brooksley Born (the woman who, in 1997, did battle with Greenspan, Rubin and Summers (and lost) over repeal of Glass Steagall and other horrors of the Clinton Administration. She's clearly been vindicated (at least in real world terms rather than DC fantasy) and the nomination would leave the anti-Warren crowd without their target and trying to regroup. Since she's been a federal finance regulator she should be able to step right in and take over.
Born would be the ideal person to put teeth in the legislation!...NOLO, the Republicans just want to continue to gum up toothless legislation!!!
The mere fact that the Republicans and all fringe elements a party thereto, plus the Wall Street hucksters who would oppose her nomination is the strongest vote of confidence Elizabeth Warren could have. Do you suppose our wonder boy at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue might just have the fortitude to make a recess appointment? I would hope so, but I would not make book on it!
Elizabeth Warren is inexorably joining the world history list of those persons destroyed by their own creation. What a bloody shame.
Trylon
Barakus isn't going to lift a finger on this one anymore than he has on any other progressive cause. Why do some "pwogwessives" as Alexander Cockburn would call them have to be so damn naive? Let's get damn real. The next president who will be a
Republican will easily be to this one's left. Now let's just get out to put a GOP candidate in the White House. "It's time for a change" as the GOP slogan said in 1952 and this is 1952 all over again.
Yes the base can punish Barakus and make it stick and make a GOP president do what they want. They made Tricky Dick get out of Vietnam. Make him do it! That's right we can and will.
Glad you understood my post.
Trylon
Oh yes, the left made Nixon get out of Vietnam. Let's see: Nixon was first elected in 1968 and the U.S. officially left Vietnam...in 1975 - after Nixon had resigned. He was elected to a second term in 1972 while still in Vietnam and after having bombed the crap out of Cambodia.
A Republican will be to the left of Obama?? I will be in reality. Drop by if you're ever in the neighborhood.
Dude - you are high as a kite!
AD is just a repug vandalizing a progressive thread. If the middle class wakes up the next president will be a strong progressive. If the next pres is a repug the middle class will soon be dead.
The Dimcrap Party in and outside the White House is so deep in self-delusion right now you couldn't cut it with a diamond-toothed chain saw. Yesterday, Obysmal's White House press spokesdweeb calmly denied the "economic recovery" had stalled and praised "long-term market indicators." Dims inside the Congressional lobbyist payola bubble actually believe that if they throw the constantly kicked left wing of their Party the Warren bone, then that will be one of only two things they need to do to get their sorry asses re-elected next year besides endlessly repeating the 'death of Bin Laden' talking point. Obama hasn't even done shit for gays (outside the military) and they are some of the wealthiest contributers to the Dimcrap Party, and he's repeatedly taken a slow loopy shit all over the unions--along with oodles of Dim members of Congress and Dim governors around the country.
Team Obomber are snorting their own propaganda like crack--just like Team Bush did. Only the consequences of Bill Clinton, Bush II and Obama are all going to be amplified this time around. The economy is like a snail sliding down a razor edge and QE2 is scheduled to run out at the end of the month. There will have to be a QE3 to keep the stock market on life support because the underlying, "free trade" withered real economy is flat-lining.
There is a very real possibility these imbecilic Dim politicians are so profoundly deluded (along with the Rethuglican and Tea Bagger pols) that they will mega-fuck not just the U.S. economy, but the entire world economy--much, much worse than the original Great Depression. We have too many other global crises upon us besides just the wrecked plutocratic casino economy that will catalyze the situation into a super-crash. Peak oil, peak fresh water, extremely volatile food prices & accelerating extreme weather due to global warming.
And consider this: Our economy is now so thoroughly over-militarized and over-extended that the consequences of that vast military portion of it suddenly collapsing along with the rest of the economy will magnify and deepen the collapse with no employment to replace lost military jobs and no way to pay out benefits to millions of veterans. One in eight Americans is dependent on food stamps and one quarter of our children live below the poverty line. Will they simply starve to death in place while our plutocrats and other well-connected elites flee to Dubai and other offshore pirate bank enclaves where they'll rely on Xe mercenary armies or the armies of oil sheiks to protect them? It's past due time for the guillotines.
hey, metal!
I can't thank you enough for this sentence:
Obama hasn't even done shit for gays (outside the military) and they are some of the wealthiest contributers to the Dimcrap Party, and he's repeatedly taken a slow loopy shit all over the unions--along with oodles of Dim members of Congress and Dim governors around the country.
slow loopy shit? I'm still laughing...
if only it weren't so serious, in the end...
I try to learn from the Buddhists to keep at least some detachment from the national-force-feeding-into-global nightmare, but everybody I know is scared shitless right now and dealing with poverty, violence, losing their apartments or homes, moving in six or seven people to a house, three generations in one home can't find jobs, etc. This is scary shit and our Establishment "leaders" in this country are colluding in a radically fascist fiscal suicide pact.
Normally fascist countries take some years to transition from foreign scapegoats to domestic ones. The U.S. corporatist McGovernment and right-wing mass media has already run the list of scapegoats and is just ramping up more pressure and/or outright hostility against all of them.
Our casino mafia bankster/offshoring CEO-class have even turned massively with increasing ferocity on tens of millions of poor people of their own race and cultural background--something even the Nazis weren't quite crazy enough to do except when Hitler himself insanely tried to destroy much of Germany with Operation Werewolf at the very end of the war. We've already let our own physical infrastructure deteriorate more than Hitler was able to persuade his people to engage in destroying as a scorched earth tactic in 1945. The whole situation in this country is so bizarrely schizophrenic from almost every ignorant, brainwashed class perspective now. Having an intelligent informed discussion outside a few enclaves is getting harder and harder. Stage six rapids immediately ahead. The political elevators have no inspectors.
Why do we keep depending on bureaucrats and politicians to save us? What was that definition of insanity again?
Direct democracy
If anybody is high on hard drugs it must be the one projecting his or her own lack of understaniding. Yes Tricky Dick did get us out of Vietnam and we made him do it. By this we're talking about the Paris agreement he signed and the US military he pulled out by the hundreds of thousands starting in 1971 when Howard Baker, oen big win Republcian came to him telling him either to get out of Vietnam or all was over for him and the party. Tricky Dick started moving as the navy would say at flank speed to do juss that with his version of cut and run and cut a deal which he accused Democrats in the 1970 midterm election of wanting to do. Then he did it.
Yes Gerald Ford complete that cut and run special but the die was already cast by that point. Ford couldn't reverse a GOP cut and run policy if he wanted to. He was just bringning out the marines at the US embassy in 1975. Active combat role for US
military in Vietnam ended in 1973 when we had to get out as we were getting our booties beat. Sound like today-- it is. Yes a GOP president will get us out, and get away with it. He'll cut and run and cut a deal. Hell Dwight D Eisenhower cut a deal in Korea after all the whining by those in his campaign on the right that we needed military victory. A Democrat typically and more so with this one with no guts would be committing political suicide to cut a deal or cut and run or both. That's the stacked deck kind of politics the USA has had for ages. Do read up on Joseph McCarthy and his gang and how this got to be the case.
Direct democracy would be fine if those of European extration could learn from the indigenous people of the USA and the rest of Western Hemisphere beforre they ever got contamined with our despotism in its various forms, but "ain't happened yet/so you better think twice. . ." as that old fellow from Boise Idaho used to sing it.
This woman is a fine decent human being and public servant-- too bad she got mixed up with a gangster president and cynical Daley machine politician. She and we desrve better. Demand better and then you'll get it. Taking power from the corrupt and restore it to the people. That's what Dwight D Eisenhower did in 1953 and cut not just one deal with the "terrible Communists" but one in Korea, one in Trieste in the same year, another in Austria in 1955, and was looking to do same again in 1960 before U2 shootdown that year. In Austria Ike did the cut and run special with all doing the cut and run and cut a deal speciall. It worked great. Don't bad mouth success. Harry Truman could never have pulled these off and he had a lot more guts than the nothing president now in the White House.