Presidential nominations: What are they good for? Absolutely nothing! Except being blocked in the Senate.
At least that’s Sen. Lamar Alexander’s (R-TN) understanding.
“That’s what nominations are for,” he quipped to reporters Wednesday after a Capitol briefing on GOP tax and regulatory proposals. “When I was nominated to be Education Secretary, Senator [Howard] Metzenbaum held me up for three months.
At the time he wasn’t pleased, but since becoming a senator, his prerogatives have changed. Though he helped broker a modest truce between the parties over obstructive tactics at the beginning of the year, he still supports a senators right to use advise and consent powers to block nominations and extract policy concessions.
That, he says, extends to extraordinary exercises of power such as the GOP’s stated intention not to confirm a director to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unless the agency is fundamentally weakened.
“We strongly object to the consumer finance administration [sic],” Alexander said.
It’s unaccountable to the people, its funded by money from the Federal Reserve every year, so it really creates a Czarina, or a Czar, who can affect mainstream transactions all over America every year without any elected representative in the House or the Senate having to say anything about it, so there’s another example of where you want to use the advise and consent power of the senate to do what we can do to stop it.
The CFPB was created as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform law to police fraudulent or dangerous financial products. Republicans have hated it from the outset, and now 44 Republicans, including some who voted for the law reform legislation, say they’ll filibuster any person of any political stripe nominated to head the Bureau unless its regulatory powers are diminished by statute. Thus, President Obama will either have to use a recess appointment to put a director in place by the July deadline, or delay its full launch indefinitely.
Brian Beutler
Brian Beutler is TPM's senior congressional reporter. Since 2009, he's led coverage of health care reform, Wall Street reform, taxes, the GOP budget, the government shutdown fight, and the debt limit fight. He can be reached at brian@talkingpointsmemo.com.
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