Warren digs in against Obama pick

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) delivered her most stinging rebuke yet against President Obama’s top Treasury nominee on Tuesday, railing against the cozy relationship between Washington and Wall Street. 

“The revolving door rips the heart out of independent government service,” she said in a forceful speech opposing Antonio Weiss, the president’s pick for the Treasury Department’s undersecretary for domestic finance.

{mosads}Her punchy words in a carefully organized address to supporters came on the same day that yet more liberal groups ramped up their calls for the progressive hero to run for president. 

But while she’s repeatedly denied any interest in a White House bid, her latest volley against Obama — who elevated her to political prominence as architect of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) — is sure to stoke further speculation that Warren has goals beyond the Senate. 

On Tuesday, she argued Weiss, the top investment banker at the Lazard financial firm, lacks appropriate experience, and she criticized his role in his current job helping companies shrink their tax bill through corporate maneuverings known as inversions.

But she also expanded her opposition beyond Weiss in particular, arguing that the fight over this nomination is actually a broader battle over Wall Street’s outsized presence in Washington and the “revolving door” that rewards finance titans for stints in the public sector.

To hear Warren tell it, she is trying to lock shut a system that rewards financiers handsomely for taking high-ranking government service jobs, with the implicit understanding that they will use those jobs to lend Wall Street a helping hand.

“Why does the revolving door matter? Because it means that too much of the time, the wind blows from the same direction,” she said. “Time after time in government, the Wall Street view prevails.

“No one likes to ignore phone calls from former colleagues, and no one likes to advance policies that could hurt future employers,” she added.

While Warren has blasted Weiss early and often, the administration has stood by the pick as the right expert for a critical job. White House spokesman Josh Earnest called Weiss “highly qualified” on Monday and said he should get bipartisan support.

“This is somebody who has very good knowledge of the way that the financial markets work, and that is critically important when you’re asking somebody to take on a position in the federal government that has such a significant bearing on those markets,” he said.

Warren noted that Weiss stands to make $20 million from his current employer if he takes a government job, adding that such a pay practice is not uncommon at the highest levels of the financial sector. She questioned why firms would be willing to pay handsomely for their top talent to leave for Washington, if there was not some implicit benefit for them in the process.

Chatter about Warren as a liberal presidential candidate shows little signs of waning. While Warren herself has repeatedly ruled out a run, the liberal group MoveOn.org announced Tuesday it was polling members on whether to launch a million-dollar effort to convince her otherwise. 

In just over three hours, MoveOn announced more than 25,000 people had signed their petition in support of the Run Warren Run campaign. Democracy For America, a group founded by former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, a 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, announced shortly after that it would join MoveOn’s efforts.

Meanwhile, Warren’s influence in the Senate is on the rise, after Democrats carved out a new spot for her in Senate leadership. But it remains to be seen whether many of her colleagues will join her in opposing Weiss. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has expressed opposition, but most senators are withholding judgment until the confirmation process is underway.

In her remarks, Warren dismissed Weiss’s decades of work on Wall Street as irrelevant experience for the Treasury position, which oversees all the department’s domestic finance work. She argued that most of Weiss’s work was in the international sector, not relevant to the job at hand, and that his backers are assuming any Wall Street experience is relevant experience.

“We’d all scratch our heads if the president nominated a theoretical physicist to be the surgeon general just because she had a background in ‘science,’ ” Warren joked.

She also ran down the “enormous” number of top administration officials under Obama and past presidents who spent time making money from the financial sector. She noted that three of the past four Treasury secretaries have spent time working for Citigroup, and the fourth turned down a job leading the bank. And other top spots in current and past administration were filled by officials who previously worked on behalf of names like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan.

“That’s the context for thinking about the nomination of Antonio Weiss,” she said.

Weiss’s backers are quick to argue that the administration is not overly reliant on Wall Street talent. While some top administration officials have spent some time working on behalf of financial giants, Warren’s critics also note that top financial regulatory spots are also filled with academics, lawyers and career public servants. The Treasury Department has said no top Wall Street executives currently occupy top department spots, and that senior staff represents a “wide range” of experience.

Some Warren critics have also noted that she herself relied on financial talent when she was helping to build the CFPB. Several top officials she brought on came from the world of finance, and some went right back to it after leaving the CFPB.

Warren acknowledged that there are “experienced and qualified” people on Wall Street but said the system is badly out of balance, and too many financial bigwigs are assumed to be good fits for government service.

“Qualifications matter, and Weiss doesn’t have them,” she said.

Weiss was nominated for the job in mid-November, and a busy final stretch for the current Congress means it is likely consideration of the pick will wait until 2015.

Jonathan Easley contributed.

Updated at 8:30 p.m.