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.
Yeah, tangling with Sen. Warren is becoming a favorite activity for the disturbed right-wing. She is sort of a substitute for Sen. Edward Kennedy, another target from the past… From Massachusetts.
I can only read the first paragraph of the WSJ article without a subscription…
What exactly is the opposition to Weiss?
Ok, so either Prez Obama or Sen. Warren wins ?? I can live with that…
He is very close to all the important people/ big banks he would be regulating. People like Warren don’t think he would do anything to help regular people like you and me.
I’m indifferent about Weiss but I think higher effective tax rates on the wealthy and higher taxes on cap gains and dividends would be a good thing. His work on the BK inversion deal doesn’t tell us anything about his personal opinion of corporate inversions. Maybe his experience would be help close the loopholes?