-The Democrat heading the Senate Banking Committee will try again next Wednesday to advance President Joe Biden’s slate of nominees to the U.S. Federal Reserve who have been held up by a Republican boycott of the confirmation vote, according to a tweet from a Bloomberg reporter on Thursday.
Spokespeople for Sherrod Brown, chair of the Senate Banking Committee, did not immediately respond to requests from Reuters for comment.
Republicans last week refused to show up for a vote on the slate, which includes Jerome Powell for a second term as Fed chair, over objections to Sarah Bloom Raskin to be the central bank’s head of financial regulation.
The other nominees are Fed Governor Lael Brainard, whom Biden wants to make Fed vice chair, along with Michigan State University’s Lisa Cook and Davidson College’s Philip Jefferson.
The Fed is expected to start raising interest rates next month to fight high inflation, a course of action the proposed new additions to the Fed have indicated they would support.
Republicans oppose Raskin because they see her as a champion of climate change activism who would try to cut lending to oil and gas companies. The Senate panel’s top Republican, Pat Toomey, has held up the vote for all nominees over what they say are ethical questions around Raskin’s actions as a director for a financial firm in 2017, and has proposed putting aside her nomination while going forward with a vote on the others.
Democrats and Raskin herself say there were no ethical lapses, and Brown wants all Fed nominees to come for a vote at the same time.
(Reporting by Dan Burns in Newtown, Conn., and Ann Saphir in Berkeley, Calif.Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Matthew Lewis)
