Warren unable to soothe Hill critics
In their latest attack on the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, House Republicans on Tuesday directed the goal of its chief architect, consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren, accusing her of lying to Congress and the drafting of a " superclass administrative elites "to run the agency, she helped create.
In a controversial surveillance meeting of government reform, the president sparred with Warren Patrick McHenry on the desktop, its oversight role of its launch as a member of staff of the White House and even the amount of time she had agreed to testify.
McHenry assertion that she lied was based on his last appearance before the committee in March, when he said it did not fully disclose his role in providing advice to government officials to negotiate a settlement repairers with mortgage incorrectly entered on the owners.
Warren said she was simply providing the information requested by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. And when McHenry said the CFPB, under the direction of Warren, held unchecked power to regulate financial products like mortgages and credit cards, Warren responded that such fears were "exaggerated" and more politics than reality .
"I was told that if you say something often enough in Washington, he was finally treated as a fact - regardless of whether it is true or not," she said, reading from prepared remarks. "While making unsubstantiated allegations may be appropriate tactics for those who want to undermine the work of the office, they are absolutely false."
The angry exchange between Warren, who is on leave from Harvard Law School to establish the agency, and reflects the broader war on McHenry's office, created when President Barack Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms law last year.
Even before the ink is dry on the bill, Republicans frustrated and deep pocketed banking and financial interests have declared their intention to neutralize the CFPB - or outright kill him.
Not having the power to repeal the law altogether, or override a veto of some of Obama, GOP lawmakers have adopted a two-pronged strategy: use the law to try to weaken the CFPB behalf of transparency and accountability - and undermine Warren, who said Tuesday in McHenry was a "flagrant sense of law" that was a symptom of "contempt for congressional oversight.