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Mayer: How Fossil-Fuel Companies Are Stonewalling Sarah Bloom Raskin's Nomination to the Fed
Link to tweet
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-fossil-fuel-companies-are-stonewalling-sarah-bloom-raskins-nomination-to-the-fed
Just in case...
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https://archive.ph/4G3pG
As the American economy faces market turmoil fuelled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the highest inflation rate in forty years, and continuing damage from the covid-19 pandemic, the Federal Reserve System’s board of governors has become a ghost ship. There are multiple vacancies on the panel, and its chairman, Jerome Powell, is awaiting Senate confirmation to a second four-year term. Last month, instead of voting on the confirmation of President Biden’s slate of five nominees to run the world’s most powerful central bank, the Republican members of the Senate Banking Committee staged a boycott.
The G.O.P.’s parliamentary maneuver was an almost unheard of act of obstruction. Its aim was to deprive the Senate committee, which is split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, of the quorum necessary for a vote on Biden’s nominees to take place. The Republicans’ goal was to block a single nominee: Sarah Bloom Raskin, Biden’s pick for vice-chair for supervision. Had they met to vote as scheduled, her nomination would likely have survived a party-line tie, which under the Senate’s current rules would have advanced it to the Senate floor for the full body’s consideration. Instead, after the twelve Republicans on the committee failed to show up, the meeting adjourned, and the Senate soon after went into recess. This left not just Bloom Raskin but all five of Biden’s top nominees for the Fed in limbo, including Powell.
In his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, Biden demanded that the panel confirm his nominees to the Federal Reserve, which, he said, “plays a critical role in fighting inflation.” The Senate Banking Committee’s chairman, Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, told me that he plans to bring Bloom Raskin’s nomination back up for a committee vote as soon as possible, but so far one hasn’t been scheduled. “We just want them to show up for work,” he said of his Republican colleagues. “In the midst of an attack, the Russians attacking Ukraine… they’re saying we’re not going to confirm the chair of the Federal Reserve, the vice-chair of supervision, the vice-chair of the Fed, and the other two governors.” He added, “We can’t run the Senate this way.”
A boycott to stop a vote is extraordinary under any circumstances, but experts said they were stunned, given the magnitude of the country’s current economic challenges. “It’s an enormous dereliction of duty,” Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, told me. Stiglitz, a progressive professor at Columbia University who has advised Democratic presidents, stressed that “the Federal Reserve is the most important economic institution in the U.S., and the U.S. is the most important economy in the world. To leave this many vacancies is just mind boggling to the rest of the world. It is just amazingly irresponsible.”
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