Slate: Warren all but nominated to head new bureau

Elizabeth Warren

Slate’s Timothy Noah last night reported that Elizabeth Warren’s nomination to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a done deal. The real question, Noah says, is whether President Obama will send her through the normal Senate confirmation process — where she is sure to face hostility from conservatives who think she’s an anti-Wall Street radical — or install her with a recess appointment.

Warren could get tied up in the normal nomination procedures, with partisanship running extremely hot these days and even Democrats like Chris Dodd doubting her chances of confirmation. But a recess appointment would only give her a year or so at the job — far shorter than the five years she’d get through a regular confirmation, and hardly enough time to get anything done.

Noah also points out that Warren’s never managed anything close to this new bureau, and because of that we can’t even know how effective of a manager she might be. And one of Noah’s sources on Warren also appears to be a master of understatement when asked about the Harvard law professor’s style:

Does she know how to schmooze a grumpy Republican? “I wouldn’t call her schmoozy.”