Elizabeth Warren Slams Republicans For Trying To Weaken Consumer Finance Protections

At a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) rebuked Republicans for blocking Richard Cordray’s confirmation as director of her brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. After a bitter confirmation fight in 2011, President Obama bypassed the Senate using a recess appointment to grant Cordray a temporary term until the end of 2013. Republicans are threatening to filibuster him this time around unless the CFPB is drastically restructured.

Warren declined to question Cordray, who has testified a dozen times. She then directed scrutiny to her Republican colleagues, calling them out for using her former lieutenant’s confirmation as an excuse to undermine the Bureau:

What I want to know is why every banking regulator since the Civil War has been funded outside the appropriations process — but unlike the consumer agency, no one in the U.S. Senate has held up confirmation of their directors demanding that that agency or those agencies be redesigned…I see nothing here but a filibuster threat against Director Cordray as an attempt to weaken the consumer agency. I think the delay in getting him confirmed is bad for consumers, it’s bad for small banks, bad for credit unions, for anyone trying to offer an honest product in an honest market. The American people deserve a Congress that worries less about helping big banks and more about helping regular people who have been cheated on mortgages, on credit cards, on student loans and on credit reports. I hope you get confirmed. You have earned it, Director Cordray.

Watch it:

Warren herself was ousted from the running for CFPB director in an effort to avoid a confirmation battle with Republicans. Still, Senate Republicans are intent on holding up the confirmation of any director to the Bureau. In a letter to Obama last month, 43 Senate Republicans vowed to filibuster any nominee unless they are allowed to hobble the agency’s authority.

Republicans have tried to weaken the Bureau from its inception, claiming it lacks transparency. Unlike other financial regulatory agencies, which are dependent on Congress for funding, the CFPB is intended to be an independent agency with independent funding. If Republicans get their way, the CFPB will lose this independence, making it vulnerable to the partisan shenanigans and funding shortages that have derailed other regulators.

Cordray’s first term demonstrates the CFPB’s efficacy as an independent agency. In one year, the agency has increased supervision over mortgage lenders, brokers, consumer reporting agencies, and large banks, set up programs to help consumers better understand loan agreements and recoup refunds from deceptive and illegal practices, and wrote new rules to prevent wrongful foreclosures.

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Governor Trying To Save Republicans From Themselves Comes Out In Favor Of Universal Background Checks

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (R), who has been trying to make a name for himself as a maverick in the GOP, on Sunday became the latest Republican to come out in favor of universal background checks on all gun sales.

Jindal is engaged in a dedicated effort to frame himself as a politician outside of the Republican establishment. Last month, he gave a speech begging Republicans not to be “the stupid party.” Presumably as part of the effort, Jindal on Sunday’s Meet the Press, agued that background checks are the most sensible, and agreeable, route to take on gun regulations:

I think there is an opportunity to do something here. If we’re serious about doing something and not just having a political football here, I think we can work with Democrats, we can work even with the administration to say. I think we all agree that we shouldn’t have guns get into the hands with those with serious mental illness. We propose legislation to provide more of that legislation, more of those records into the background check system than is happening today. Let’s fix the current background system.

In January, Jindal pushed to strengthen the system in Louisiana for inputting the mentally ill into the National Instant Criminal Background Check system, but the move was mostly symbolic. Overall, Jindal’s track record on guns has been to side with gun manufacturers over protecting citizens. In 2010, he signed a law that allowed guns in houses of worship. He has also voted to protect gun manufacturers from lawsuits, and vehemently opposes any regulation on high capacity magazine clips or automatic weapons.

Currently, background checks are not required on private gun sales, allowing an easy workaround for criminals or the mentally ill to buy firearms. But 92 percent of Americans think that they should be. And Jindal is actually not a maverick on the issue; Republicans have been tapping into this public opinion of late, with several prominent figures including Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Tom Coburn (R-OK), and Mark Kirk (R-IL) assessing that it’s an achievable goal for Congress to take on.

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Marco Rubio Is Trying To Have It Both Ways On Immigration Reform

In January, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined a group of eight senators working to pass comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship for the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants. Appearing on a series of conservative talk radio stations to promote the plan, the first-term senator characterized the effort as “the first step” in the long road toward fixing the nation’s broken immigration system and said he expected to incorporate changes from both President Obama and the American public before any bill could become law.

“All we can come up with is a starting point…there are, you know, 94 other senators who have opinions about what this law should look like and there is the American public and there is the House and the Executive Branch so obviously people are going to have some input as to what they want it to look like …this is the first step, this is the architecture,” Rubio told Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey in January.

But on Sunday, Rubio signaled that he has little actual interest in collaborating with the White House on reform. After USA Today published a leaked and incomplete draft of President Obama’s immigration reform bill — which resembles 2007's bipartisan legislation and Rubio’s own principles — the first-term senator rushed a statement condemning the administration for contributing to the very debate he claimed would be incomplete without its input. Rather than offering a constructive critique of the leaked portions or highlighting areas of similarity, Rubio announced that Obama’s bill is “disappointing to those of us working on a serious solution” and is “dead on arrival in Congress.”

The statement, designed to convince conservatives that the immigration reform principles Rubio supports differ drastically from Obama’s, is particularly jarring in light of the senator’s past insistance that the president should lead on immigration.

Earlier this year, Rubio told the Wall Street Journal that Obama has “not done a thing” on reform and is likely using the issue to mobilize the Democratic base. During the presidential campaign, Rubio criticized Obama for failing to achieve reform in his first term. “His party controlled Congress for two years,” he told Fox News in October, “and they did absolutely nothing.”

But now that Obama is engaged with the issue, Rubio is still outraged: He’s claiming that the president is undermining the Congressional legislative process by developing an alternative plan should bipartisan talks break down while complaining that Obama isn’t involved enough in one-on-one conversations with lawmakers.

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Chaffetz: Obama trying 'to scare people' over debt limit

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) late Monday accused President Obama of trying to frighten Americans with ramped-up rhetoric about the costs of not raising the debt ceiling.

“The president does an exceptional job of scaring America,” Chaffetz said on Fox News Channel’s “On The Record With Greta van Susteren.” “He wants to use the military paychecks to try to scare people, ‘We’re going to hurt the elderly’ — you don’t have to do that.”

At a press conference on Monday, Obama warned that if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling, Social Security checks might not go out and troops overseas might not be paid. He also said investors would lose confidence in the economy and markets could crash.

“Investors around the world will ask if the United States of America is, in fact, a safe bet,” he said. “Markets could go haywire; interest rates could spike.”

Obama’s warnings come as the White House and Republicans prepare for a new fight over raising the nation’s borrowing limit.

The president is pushing for a clean debt-limit hike, while the GOP sees an opportunity to use the threat of default to force Obama to agree to spending cuts and entitlement reform.

The U.S. suffered its first-ever credit downgrade after the last debt-ceiling showdown in 2011. Treasury Secretary Geithner warned congressional leaders Monday that the U.S. could default as early as mid-February.

But Chaffetz downplayed the importance of raising the debt ceiling, saying the Treasury could prioritize payments for Social Security and the military, while withholding payments on items that wouldn’t spook the markets.

“There are lots of things to do; the president has lots of discretion to curb back that spending to make sure that Social Security payments are paid, interest is paid, we don’t default on our debts,” Chaffetz said. “The president was terribly irresponsible today, to say he’s not even going to talk about it because he’s above it, blame Congress — look, in part Congress helped create this problem, but now we’re going to solve this problem.”

Many Senate Democrats have called on Obama to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling, bypassing Congress.

Chaffetz said such a move would provoke a “constitutional crisis.”

“You can only do this as authorized by law, and law is only created by the United States Congress,” Chaffetz said. “He has no ground to stand on.”

On that count, Obama appears to agree; on Monday, he likewise dismissed the idea that the White House could do anything on its own.

“I understand the impulse to try to get around this in a simple way, but there’s one way to get around this,” he said. “And that is for Congress to authorize me to pay for those items of spending that they have already authorized.”

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