They really do know how to count
Richard Cordray is now the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That’s a big deal.
The聽CFPB was officially formed over two years ago (on July 21, 2011), but Senate Republicans blocked Cordray’s nomination, well, because they don’t like the CFPB.
It was the brainchild of President Obama. That means Republicans find themselves fuming with every mention of it.
It doesn’t matter that the CFPB is a valuable tool which has a stated goal to “promote fairness and transparency for mortgages, credit cards and other consumer financial products and services.”
The president nominated Cordray just before the law enabling the Bureau went into effect.
Nobody ever questioned Cordray’s suitability for the job. (He’s been a county treasurer, the state treasurer of Ohio, the state’s solicitor, a member of the Ohio House of Representatives and its attorney general.) They’ve just chaffed at Obama’s suitability to name him.
That’s nothing new. Obama has had nearly as many holds put on his executive nominees as the previous 10 presidents combined.
Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford had no holds put on the nominees. Carter had two; Reagan, two; George H.W. Bush, none; Bill Clinton, nine; and George W. Bush had seven — for a total of 20.
Barack Obama has had a whopping total of 16 filibustered executive nominees.
Republicans everywhere, I guess, still haven’t gotten the message that Obama is the president and that the U.S. Senate has a majority of Democrats who are in support of Obama’s nominees. Yet, Republicans have used the filibuster to level the playing field, as confidence in Congress has dropped to an all time low — 10 percent — according to Gallup polling.
They’ve made sure that just about anything that comes up in the Senate needs 60 votes to pass, even though Democrats outnumber Republicans 52 to 46 — with two Independents voting, for the most part, with Democrats. In other words, the majority (Democrats) are under the shadow of Republicans who aggressively stop the Senate from functioning as it should.
And while there have been 16 holds placed on Obama’s picks to join his team, the number of general filibusters placed on any Democratic legislation are astounding. By some counts, U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, majority leader, has been forced to face over 400 Republican legislative filibusters.
Last week, the furor over the Republican foot-dragging came to a head, when Reid hinted he might employ what’s known as “the nuclear option.” Reid would’ve simply ignored all Senate rules and offered executive nominees for a simple majority vote.
Before you get the impression there might have been something extra-constitutional about such a maneuver — there’s nothing in the U.S. Constitution about a Senate majority leader who would ignore a filibuster and request a straight up-or-down vote.
With that prospect, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell went on the attack — claiming that if Reid went ahead with his plan, “our friend, the majority leader, is going to be remembered as the worst leader here, ever.”
The giggles had barely subsided, when some Republicans got out their pocket calculators and figured out that 54 is more than 46 — and that the will of those 54 is more representative of the will of the American people than yet another grand stall.
A meeting was called, and Republicans and Democrats agreed to end the willful abandonment of Republican’s Punch and Judy politics.
One of those Republicans who helped shed light on the short straw his fellow Republican Senators were about to pull was, of all people, John McCain.
In the end, not only was Cordray’s nomination cleared for approval, so were Obama’s nominees for secretary of labor, the Environmental Protection Agency and for president of the Export-Import Bank.
That said, Obama’s nominees for the National Labor Relations Board were withdrawn, but his future nominees for those positions will, according to the agreement, be cleared without any filibusters.
I truly doubt that this agreement will lead to a new era of bipartisanship. I just think Republicans have finally learned to count.
Good for them.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. Email him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net