The Huffington Post has more:
Nearly two years after Wall Street waged a successful campaign to keep consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren from running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the incoming senator will be tapped to serve on the Banking Committee, according to four sources familiar with the situation. It’s a victory for progressives who battled to win her a seat on the panel that oversees the implementation of Dodd-Frank and other banking regulations.
Warren knocked out Republican Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts in the most expensive Senate contest of 2012, with Wall Street spending heavily to beat Warren, a former Harvard law professor.
Sources also told HuffPost that Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) will be named to the panel.
Warren’s ascension to the panel gives her influence over regulators and the industry that non-panel members don’t enjoy.
As Daily Intel’s Kevin Roose notes, Warren is likelier to take her time building a network of ideological kin than to take a one-woman stab at the financial establishment right off the bat:
After my piece on Wall Street’s worries about Warren ran last week, I got a call from a senior banking industry lobbyist, who contended that Warren herself wasn’t planning to come into the Senate and immediately begin pushing an anti-bank agenda. Her more likely tactic, he said, would be to slow-play the situation, quietly amassing power and influence among fellow senators at first and then going after the banks once a coalition had been established.
“She realizes that if she appears to be a caricature of herself, she won’t be super-relevant in the Senate,” the lobbyist said.
Whatever her strategy, this is good news for progressive observers, who worried that Senate Democrats — always a weak and unreliable bunch — would cave under pressure from their Wall Street backers and keep Warren off the committee.
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