Excerpts
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): Even as the presidential campaign heats up, President Obama and congressional Republicans are at odds once again. This time, it's part of a long-running battle over the president's nominees who've been blocked from confirmation.
President Obama chose the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio, to name the state's former attorney general, Richard Cordray, as director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
----
JEFFREY BROWN: But the move set off what could be a constitutional showdown between the executive and legislative branches. White House aides said the president acted under his authority to make recess appointments when Congress is not in session.
Republicans said the Senate remains in so-called pro forma sessions over the holidays, open for business even if no business is scheduled to take place. In a statement, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, "President Obama, in an unprecedented move, has arrogantly circumvented the American people."
The president had nominated Cordray in July to run the new agency created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. Consumer advocates initially hoped that Elizabeth Warren, the bureau's chief architect, would oversee it, but the Harvard professor and the agency itself ran into strong opposition from Republicans.
Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby.
SEN. RICHARD SHELBY, R-Ala.: This massive new bureaucracy was designed by the drafters of Dodd-Frank to be virtually unaccountable to the American people. Before we spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a new federal government agency, I believe we should ensure that it can be held accountable for its actions.
JEFFREY BROWN: Last month, Senate Republicans blocked action on Richard Cordray's nomination.
----
BINYAMIN APPELBAUM, The New York Times: That's right. This is a centerpiece -- this agency was a centerpiece of the Democratic vision for how financial regulation should be overhauled in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
The idea is that the responsibility for protecting consumers, for enforcing all the various regulations that are intended to protect borrowers and other users of financial products should come under a single agency, which would have the authority to enforce those rules, to evaluate whether new rules were needed, to look for places where consumers were being abused by deceptive practices, by overcharging, by hidden fees, and to take action.
JEFFREY BROWN: And it's been up and running, but leaderless.
BINYAMIN APPELBAUM: That's right.
JEFFREY BROWN: So what does that mean?
BINYAMIN APPELBAUM: Well, the way the law was written is that so long as the agency doesn't have a permanent director, its power are very circumscribed.
It can enforce existing regulations on the largest banks, but it cannot enforce anything over non-bank financial companies -- that's payday lenders, student lenders, debt collectors. A whole range of companies that interact with consumers, have never fallen under federal regulation before, will now for the first time. But until a permanent director was appointed, those powers didn't come into effect.
JEFFREY BROWN: All right, so, David Hawkings, Republicans, knowing this, have blocked the appointment of a director.
And it's now it's devolved into a fight over recess appointment.
DAVID HAWKINGS, CQ Roll Call: Right.
JEFFREY BROWN: What is...
DAVID HAWKINGS: This is something you would never even study in A.P. civics, but it's important now.
And there's been an argument about this for at least 100 years as to when is the Senate in recess in such a way as the president can come in there and bypass the advice-and-consent requirements of the Constitution for most big deal appointees?
Teddy Roosevelt 100 years ago used a tiny couple-of-second break between the end of one Congress and the beginning of another to put 100 people on the job that the Senate had refused to confirm. Harry Truman did something similar. In the modern day for -- there's been a different sort of fight since the 1990s, when Bill Clinton and the Republicans who had power to block his appointees in the Senate went to war over this.
And, most recently, since about 1997, when George Bush put about 60 of his people on the job with recess appointments, Harry Reid said, from now on, we're not going to go into what is traditionally thought of as a real recess, one lasting three days or longer.
We will come back every three days, we will turn on the lights in the Senate, we will say the Pledge of Allegiance, and then we will go home.
JEFFREY BROWN: This is what they call the pro forma session.
DAVID HAWKINGS: And that is the pro forma session. And if you do it every third business day, in Harry Reid's view, and in something that Mitch McConnell and other all agreed to, this essentially was enough of Senate activity to forswear these recess appointments.
JEFFREY BROWN: So, Democrats did this before and had these pro forma sessions.
DAVID HAWKINGS: Yes, they did.
Note the agency is ALREADY LAW, the fight is over the appointment of the leader of the agency.
The Republicans didn't like the agency in the first place but could not block its passage in the midst of the financial meltdown and subsidy backlash, so now they are using this excuse of BLOCKING (not allowing floor-vote on nomination) the appointment of the leader to cripple the agency.
The conservative rational is that the agency has no oversight (Republican oversight that is), by which they really mean Republicans cannot fight and block anything the agency tries to do to protect the American people from the predatory practices of the financial industry. In other words, Republicans really want to protect their big-money contributors ahead of protecting American consumers.
For my non-American readers, Roto-Rooter company is a sewer and plumbing franchise
No comments:
Post a Comment