One thing’s for sure: Elizabeth Warren has been confirmed to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by the media (and no one else). How else to explain why it is that the press has eagerly latched onto Warren as not merely the anti-banker, but as the rightful leader of an agency she has no constitutional or legislative authority to run?
Bloomberg/Businessweek features her on their cover, with this bit featured in this morning’s edition of Politico’s Morning Money:
While Washington bickers, Warren has built the CFPB largely to her specs, and almost entirely free of interference from Congress and the Administration, which devotes most of its attention to fixing the economy. Few Cabinet secretaries can claim to have left as indelible a mark on the departments they lead as Elizabeth Warren has already left on the one she doesn’t.
If you’d like a blueprint for the thing that freaks out conservatives, and should make journalists even more skeptical, is when someone has done anything “free of interference from Congress.” Yes, that’s the problem isn’t it? And while we have an actual journalist writing this in such a way that it seems like a feature, and not a bug, you gotta wonder why it is even her strongest admirers don’t pause for a moment and go, “Wait a second. Isn’t Warren undermining her own agency? Because good luck for the poor fool who has to head up the agency in her wake.
