Elizabeth Warren was impassioned before she was elected to the Senate. She led the committee that oversaw the disbursal of TARP funds after the financial crisis. Before that, as a professor, she studied how the basics of an American life—a nice home, adequate health care, and a good education for the kids—were squeezing the middle class dry.
Now, in hearing after hearing, she’s making politicians, businesspeople and regulators answer for their actions. Why doesn’t the government take law-breaking banks to court? Why isn’t the S.E.C. regulating the financial trickery that crashed the economy? Why isn’t the minimum wage 22 dollars an hour? She pursues each line of questioning with the exactitude of a professor and the intensity of someone who understands that political power can do a lot more than just satisfy ambition. I hope other members of Congress are watching.
She’s got good reason to be relentless, as she’s staring down Republican colleagues keen on turning the American economy into a neoliberal wasteland. At the end of last year, the G.O.P. centered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in its crosshairs. The CFPB is both the finest exercise of federal power in the last decade, and Senator Warren’s signal cause.
In 2009, she worked with President Obama and Congress to create a consumer protection agency, part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. Through sheer force of will, the bill passed.
The CFPB has not sat on its hands. It has returned hundreds of millions of dollars to consumers ripped off by credit card companies; it has mandated that banks use simpler mortgage contracts; it has—and this is relevant to you, dear reader—mandated that colleges be more transparent about how much they actually cost. Now, the agency has its eye on car loan providers who have been charging people of color higher rates. These regulations are sensible. They are lawful. They are morally right. Anyone who says otherwise is saying that big companies should be able to cheat consumers and break the law.
With that in mind, chew on the fact that the Republican Senate minority filibustered the nomination of Richard Cordray, President Obama’s choice to lead the consumer agency, in 2011. So the President appointed him during a Senate recess. But Cordray’s term is up at the end of 2013, and he needs a Senate vote to continue at the CFPB. The GOP has denied him that; they’re filibustering him again.
What does the loyal opposition demand? Nothing, they claim, other than “accountability and transparency.” They want a bipartisan commission to oversee the CFPB, and for its budget to come from Congressional appropriations instead of the Federal Reserve, as it currently does. Translation: the GOP wants more choke points, more ways to stymie financial regulation. If the Democrats relent, the CFPB will be eviscerated. If they hold firm, the agency will have no director, and will be eviscerated.
Filibustering Rich Cordray’s nomination neatly reveals what Congressional Republicans really stand for. They are not interested, as they frequently claim, in supporting the middle class or small businesses. They are interested in Big Businesses and—evidently—in ensuring that those Big Businesses have all the latitude they need to turn a profit, even if that means exploiting consumers and ruining the economy for poor and middle-class Americans.
In 2011, the CFPB’s champion wasn’t a senator—now she is, after winning her Massachusetts seat handily in November, 2012. Warren has been raising a ruckus about this GOP chicanery. But she’s trapped between two solid walls: the Republican minority and the ossified procedures of the Senate. Without 60 votes to break the filibuster, Rich Cordray won’t be confirmed any time soon. It is heartening to see Elizabeth Warren speak truth with such vigor, but demoralizing that her audience is unmoved by common sense or reason, and that our political process is so profoundly not dynamic. Those who want our economy to be fair have an advocate, but she can speak only so loudly; until her colleagues take heed, the CFPB won’t
have teeth.