Obama campaign using Twitter to help push for Consumer Bureau nominee

{mosads}Using the tool, Obama backers can now send one of four prewritten messages to GOP senators blocking Cordray, including a call to “stop playing politics with consumer protection.”

As part of the jobs bill push, Twitters users who don’t live in Republican districts could send their tweets imploring for passage to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). In Cordray’s case, users in states with two Democratic senators can send messages to Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee who is leading the Republican senators demanding changes to the CFPB before considering Cordray’s confirmation.

Cordray, Ohio’s former attorney general, was approved down a party-line vote by the Senate Banking Committee Thursday, but a broad GOP blockade still prevents his confirmation in the full Senate.

Before he was even nominated, 44 Republican senators announced they would block any nominee to head the bureau unless several changes were made to its structure. They argued that the changes would make the overly powerful agency more accountable, while CFPB backers contend it is simply a bid to weaken it.

“They are opposing him—and any other nominee—because they don’t want the agency to exist at all,” wrote Jen O’Malley Dillon, Obama’s deputy campaign manager on the president’s reelection website.

The struggle over Cordray is just the latest in what has been a lengthy partisan fight over the CFPB, which was created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law and opened its doors in July.

The bureau is charged with monitoring banks and other financial institutions as it pertains to consumer protection, but cannot realize its full powers until after a director is put in place.

Republicans want to see the top of the bureau changed so it is not run by a lone director, but rather a multi-person commission, which they argue would make it more balanced and deliberate and less dependent on a single leader’s personality.