If you’re just checking in on Washington politics after the holidays and the Iowa caucuses, you’re likely hearing that Republicans in Congress and their throught-masters at Fox are in a spittle-spewing rage over Pres. Obama’s recess appointment of former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Board, or CFPB, watchdog agency.
After successfully blocking the nomination of Elizabeth Warren, the consumer advocate and Harvard professor who had been appointed to set up the CFPB — and who is now running for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts — last year, Senate Republicans tried to stop Cordray’s appointment during the current recess by briefly gaveling the Senate in and out of pro forma sessions every day. Obama went around this and appointed Cordray by using a precedent set by Republican Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, who, in 1903, filled more than 160 administration positions while the Senate was on break for less than a day.
Republicans were holding the Cordray nomination hostage in order to extort a major overhaul of the laws that would, in essence, defang the watchdog agency. The Republicans’ objective was to ensure that their corporate sponsors in the financial industry would be able to continue to rip off consumers, including the constituents of these hostage-taking Republicans senators, legally, as they had been when Republicans controlled Congress, the Judiciary and Executive branches during the Bush administration.
Under the sway of their minority tea-bagger base, Republicans used political extortion multiple times last year to push the national and world economy to the brink of collapse. Their motives then were simply to create havoc. The extortion over the Warren and Cordray nominations has a different goal, says Jonathan Chait:
This is an entirely new use of congressional power to block appointments. The normally mild-mannered James Fallows has called this “nullification,” and Republicans have begun using it to paralyze large swaths of the government. The normal presidential recourse against hardened opposition to an executive branch nominee is to make the appointment when Congress is out of session, but Republicans closed off that avenue as well, by holding pro forma sessions year-round. If it held up, this would give Congress enormous power over the president – allowing it to unilaterally halt any agency it likes in return for any demand at all. They have likewise refused to confirm any directors at all to the National Labor Relations Board, denying the agency a quorum and essentially halting the enforcement of federal labor law.
One delightful by-product of this is that it has right-wingers in a spittle-spewing rage. Another is that the reality-based community are cautiously optimistic that the president and his team are finally starting to play hardball with the GOP-tea party, who have freely admitted they are deliberately sabotaging the economy in hopes the president will fail for the past three years.
Right-leaning Politico has a round-up of reaction from the left:
“I really didn’t think Obama would want to set a new presidential precedent like this,” writes FireDogLake’s David Dayden, who had earlier predicted that the president would pass on recess appointments. “But obstructionists in the Senate have really left him little choice. … Until a price is paid for obstruction, there’s no reason for the obstructors to stop.”
“No More Mr. Nice Obama” and “King of the Playground,” blared headlines for posts at the progressive The American Prospect.
Obama is “sending one more signal that the days of his accommodating Republican rejectionists are over,” the magazine’s Harold Meyerson wrote.
Daily Kos hailed Obama’s move as “bold,” a decision made despite the site’s prediction that “most [Republicans] will declare their use of a recess appointment to be unconstitutional, while talk of impeaching Obama will likely spread throughout the right-wing media.”
“President Obama is obviously getting fed up with the nihilistic obstructionism of the Republican Party,” added Charles Johnson at LittleGreenFootballs.
