Katrina vanden Heuvel: Why Obama should appoint Elizabeth Warren

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When the Senate goes on recess at the end of this week, President Obama should appoint Elizabeth Warren to direct the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). By making a recess appointment, the president can name the best qualified leader to head the new agency, while demonstrating he’s willing to stand up to Republican obstruction and Wall Street pressure. He’ll earn plaudits not only from the base of the Democratic Party that adores Warren but also from independent voters, who will be thankful for an advocate for consumers willing to stand up to the Wall Street lobby.

Given the mandate of the CFPB — to police “unfair, deceptive or abusive practices” of the financial world — anyone with a whit of sense knows that Elizabeth Warren is the best person to head the new agency.

Warren earned just renown for her path-breaking work on the financial pressures on middle-class families, while helping to develop consumer finance law as a professor at Harvard Law School. As head of the oversight panel that Congress established to provide independent review of the bank bailout, she challenged the secretive practices of the Treasury Department and helped provide Congress and citizens with a better sense of the extraordinary measures being taken to bail out the big banks. This pleased neither Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner nor Wall Street.

Warren originated the idea of a consumer financial protection agency. She likes to note that consumers get greater protection for their toasters than they do from the unscrupulous bank, credit card, car loan and payday lenders whose tricks can devastate their lives. Her inspired advocacy led the administration to include the CFPB in its financial reform legislation and helped galvanize the popular support that led to the agency’s creation over the fierce opposition of the Wall Street lobby.

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