If you’re an Elizabeth Warren fan or really if you’re just into facts, you gotta watch this. It’s Elizabeth Warren going on CNBC’s Squawk Box, defending her plan to bring back a new version of the Glass-Steagall Act. It’s maybe the best example of the sort of matter-anti-matter reaction that happens when someone who actually knows some history and policy makes first contact with a gaggle of ignorant CNBC yakkers. Video after the jump … Read More
Today at 3PM Dr. Christopher Parker will join us for a Live Chat at TPMPrime. He’s just authored Change They Can’t Believe In which explores why people join the Tea Party. Parker is also an expert on racial and ethnic politics in the United States. Get your questions in now and join us at 3 PM.
VA Gov. Bob McDonnell is acting more and more like a guy who thinks he might do time.
Weeks after issuing a public warning about the danger of bands ‘anti-gay thugs’, Eric Ohena Lembembe, a prominent gay rights activist in Cameroon, was found dead in his home, apparently tortured before being killed.
There have been 23 mass shootings since the Aurora, Colorado massacre. Total body count 126 people.
Bob Filner, San Diego Mayor struggling to hold on to his job, has backtracked, said he didn’t sexually harass anyone and won’t resign. Now he’s accused of telling female workers in his office that they’d do better “if they worked without their panties on.”
In the end, Richard Cordray won 71 votes to thwart the GOP filibuster of his nomination. A final vote to confirm him is expected later today.
The odd ones out in today’s Senate deal are Sharon Block and Richard Griffin. Those are the two Obama appointees to the NLRB who are now going to be withdrawn and will not even get a Senate vote. They will be replaced by new nominees who are guaranteed, under the terms of the deal between Senate Democrats and Republicans, to win confirmation before the end of the summer.
Block and Griffin, who were recess-appointed to the NLRB by Obama previously, are left on the outside looking in, after a long battle to win confirmation. Obama pulls the plug on their nominations and they go home.
Cordray was also recess-appointed, so it’s not clear why he gets to proceed and the two NLRB nominees do not. The idea is that they were somehow tainted by the recess appointments (and the subsequent court decision that charted new ground in declaring their recess appointments unconstitutional, along with most of the recess appointment ever made). But so was Cordray. Compromises, though, often abide only by their own logic.
Richard Cordray’s nomination seems set to sail through the Senate now. Voting is underway on cloture, which is where we’ll see if Cordray can overcome the filibuster that has already derailed his nomination once and has delayed his confirmation for years and denied a permanent director for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau since its creation. So far, he’s on track to easily beat the filibuster, as per the deal struck to break the GOP-created logjam.