A Consumer's Report

The good news is that we have a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The bad news is it may never do the job it's intended to do. See, Republicans have a few issues with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. They're very much for it, except for the consumer financial protection part.

Be that as it may, they've made it clear that they would never submit to the appointment of Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard financial expert who got the goshdarn agency up and running, to serve as its first chairperson. It seems she sides with ordinary folks too much. So Ms. Warren, whom they don't trust enough not to do the job, won't be getting it. President Obama has appointed someone else.

If you're a fan of making big banks and financiers behave, you're not going to like David Corn's article for Mother Jones magazine, in which Corn explains that Ms. Warren was too controversial for Obama to nominate. He couldn't even nominate her for a recess appointment; Republicans have conspired to keep Congress in session, a trick Democrats dared not try to block George Walker Bush's nomination of noted xenophobe John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations. (Rumor has it that United Nations delegates still spit on the ground at the mention of Bolton's name. I started the rumor just now. :-D) So Obama nominated Richard Cordray, a former Ohio state attorney general, to head the agency. The good news is, he shares Elizabeth Warren's views. The bad news is, he shares Elizabeth Warren's views.

But that's not all. Republicans are concerned with the agency's separate budget and perceived lack of congressional oversight that would give the eventual chairperson way too much of a free reign in, well, regulating Wall Street. They've also complained about the CFPB being one more burdensome bureaucracy (because it would hinder shady Wall Street dealings) and it wouldn't be accountable to Congress . . . only to the people. Forty-four Senate Republicans have singed a letter vowing not to let any CPFB chairperson nominees be voted in the Senate unless Obama agrees to changes in the CFPB that would have more congressional oversight . . . and thus more congressional meddling to weaken and emasculate the agency. So, even Cordray's appointment is likely dead on arrival.

Obama may have had strategically good reasons not to appoint Ms. Warren, but this allows her to possibly run for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts against Republican incumbent Scott Brown next year. Bay State Democrats lost this seat - Ted Kennedy's in a special election by nominating a horrible candidate, and the possibilities for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination in 2012 are even worse. Brown is the favorite in this Democratic state. Elizabeth Warren, with her feistiness and her populism, would make a great candidate as well as a great senator, and she's indicated that she might run. I hope she does. Because none of the other nine Republican U.S. Senate seats up for re-election in 2012 - did I mention the Democrats have 23 U.S. seats up for re-election next year? - are likely to flip.

If you can find a Democrat to unseat Mississippi's Senator Roger Wicker, more power to you. But Democratic hopes of stemming Senate seat losses in 2012 and possibly preserving their majority center on a vigorous Elizabeth Warren candidacy in Massachusetts.

So what will happen to the CFPB? Republicans will stonewall any nominee for the post until they finally win back all the power they had under Bush and abolish it.

Sorry.