It's Pretty Damn Official: Warren Is at the Controls

Here's the latest from WSJ on Elizabeth Warren:

President Barack Obama this week will appoint Elizabeth Warren to a lead role setting up the new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, two Democratic officials said, a move that will allow the White House to avoid a messy Senate fight over her role.

Ms. Warren, currently a professor at Harvard Law School, will be named an assistant to the president and special advisor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in charge of launching the new agency and setting its mission. She was a candidate to be the agency's first director, a position that remains unfilled, but would likely have had trouble securing confirmation because of opposition in the Senate.

The White House's decision to seek a middle ground could appease its liberal base, which has loudly championed her candidacy, but will irk Republicans, who oppose her leading the agency and have already charged the administration with making an end-run around the Senate confirmation process...

Ms. Warren's powers will be broad, despite her unusual title. She will recruit staff for the agency, set the policy mission and serve as the recognizable public face for a new agency the administration wants to promote. The bureau has powers to write and enforce credit card and mortgage rules against a range of financial companies, with powers to examine big lenders like Bank of America Corp. and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.


The administration is expected to eventually nominate someone to be the first director of this agency, but that process could take several months...

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.) earlier this week said it would be a mistake for the White House to put her in an interim role without having her nominated for Senate scrutiny.


Liberal groups have spent months demanding Ms. Warren be appointed to run the new agency, even producing a rap video calling her for nomination. The White House has at times appeared torn, given that Ms. Warren is beloved by the left but considered politically toxic with business groups. ..

People familiar with the matter say Treasury officials have had a hard time recruiting top officials because of uncertainty over who would run the bureau. Some prospective employees have forwarded their resumes directly to Ms. Warren, people familiar with the recruitment process said.

Note: If you are a little confused why this is going through Treasury, here's what is going on:

The Dodd-Frank Bill which created the CFPB has a provision in it that allows the Treasury Secretary to run the bureau until an official head is confirmed by the Senate. Such an allowance to the Treasury Secretary would also slide down to any Deputy Secretary, or in this case Special Advisor to Geithner, Warren.

Noteworthy is that she is also being named, according to WSJ, as an assistant to the President. This appears as a Warren end run around Geithner. Most certainly Geithner would throw any obstacle he could to slow and obstruct Warren, but the Treasury Secretary connection has to be made because of the requirements of the Dodd-Frank Bill. The adviser to the President bit gives her the ability to ignore Geithner and go directly to the President.

Warren is very media savvy. After an initial focus on the Obama end run around Senate approval, she will have MSM eating out of the palm of her hand.

She has an annual $400 million budget. But she will not spend one penny of it to learn basic economics, of which she is clueless. She already knows where she wants to march consumer finance  and she will eventually destroy consumer finance and try to stretch the definition of consumer finance to include as much of what is going on around the planet as she can.