The Wall Street Journal opinion section has a recommendation for Republicans trying to decide whether to join Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) crusade against an Obama administration nominee for the Treasury Department: help get the nominee get confirmed and use that as leverage.
The Journal, in an opinion piece on Sunday, suggested Republicans would be better off supporting Treasury nominee Antonio Weiss (who Warren strongly opposes) and using that support as a bargaining chip for, maybe, a “conservative judicial nominee.”
The editorial, after a few snarky paragraphs on how Weiss’s Democratic bona fides are suddenly no longer good enough for Warren and a number of other liberal critics, cautioned that Republicans didn’t have to confirm him.
“But if Republicans do believe that a President should get appointees he wants, they might want to ask for something in return for confirming Mr. Weiss — say, a conservative judicial nominee, or a point more off the corporate tax rate as part of reform,” the opinion piece concluded. “This may be the only way Mr. Obama’s man can survive the new liberal ban on public service for anyone who has worked on Wall Street.”
Warren and a growing number of other Democrats argue that Weiss, a former banker with Lazard, is too close to Wall Street and his confirmation as undersecretary for domestic policy at the Treasury would continue a dangerous level of Wall Street influence in the federal government.
