Business

OVERNIGHT MONEY: Cordray gets his day in the Senate

by Vicki Needham, Peter Schroeder, Bernie Becker and Erik Wasson - 10/05/11 10:00 PM ET

The Senate Banking Committee will vote on whether President Obama’s selection to head the new agency should win the gig, but the vote will likely be the latest round in what has been a knock-down, drag-out partisan fight over the agency and how it should operate.

While it’s expected the former Ohio attorney general will advance on a party-line vote, Cordray’s nomination could get stuck on the winding yellow brick road instead of landing on the express lane to the full Senate. Watch out for flying monkeys.

{mosads}A filibuster-proof bloc of Republican senators has promised to block any nominee to head the CFPB until several changes are made to its structure — changes the administration and the bureau’s backers aren’t interested in making.

Republicans contend the CFPB has overly broad powers and lacks accountability. They want to replace the director with a commission and bring its budget under the control of congressional appropriators.

Democrats say the GOP has always opposed the CFPB, and now are simply looking to stifle and perhaps kill it.

Caught in the middle is Cordray, who was tapped by the president for the job in a compromise move, passing over liberal favorite and CFPB architect Elizabeth Warren — who now is on the campaign trail in Massachusetts, gunning for GOP Sen. Scott Brown’s seat.

WHAT ELSE TO WATCH FOR:

The FSOC you say?: Yes, that’s Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner all over the Capitol on Thursday. As chairman of the new Financial Stability Oversight Council — FSOC for short — Geithner has been charged with delivering the panel’s annual report before both chambers of Congress. The panel, created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, is loaded with top federal officials charged with monitoring the entire — yes, the whole thing — financial system. Geithner’s got excellent timing, with the panel slated to roll out one of its biggest initiatives in the coming days — a proposed rule on the “Volcker Rule,” which is aimed at limiting the amount of trading a financial firm can do not for clients, but its own profit margin.

Catch him in the morning at Senate Banking and for his matinee performance at the House Financial Services Committee.

The Repat rumba: Sens. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) are doing a little dance — well, maybe not, but they will be joining a growing number of lawmakers in offering legislation to at least temporarily lower corporations’ tax bills for offshore profits.

The bipartisan duo’s measure, according to a brief description obtained by The Hill, is similar to other congressional proposals. It would offer multinationals the chance to drop their tax rate on repatriated funds to as low as 5.25 percent, and also includes disincentives for shedding jobs.

As it stands, support and opposition for a tax holiday doesn’t break down cleanly along party or ideological lines. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has signaled that Hagan and McCain’s bill would need to be paired with infrastructure initiatives to have a chance of making it through the Senate, Bloomberg reported.

Elsewhere, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal group and no fan of corporate tax holidays, will hold a briefing on the issue Thursday — featuring, among others, Edward Kleinbard, a former chief of staff at the Joint Committee on Taxation, and Jared Bernstein, former adviser to Vice President Biden.

Step. Step. Dip.

Talking taxes!: It’s double the trouble for tax discussions on Thursday, with both Senate Finance and the Joint Economic Committee holding morning events. Continuing its in-depth look at the tax code, the Senate Finance committee will examine tax preferences for home ownership, including the mortgage interest deduction. John Breaux, himself a former Senate Finance member, is among the scheduled witnesses. The mortgage interest deduction was spared during the last successful overhaul of the tax code a quarter-century ago, and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said this year that he doesn’t think there’s any real desire to scrap it now. Over at the JEC, Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics and Donald Marron of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center are among those expected to talk about how tax incentives can spur job creation — a topic that has been center stage all around Washington in recent weeks and months.

House on housing: That sounds more confusing than it is — a House Financial Services subcommittee will take a look at the housing crisis as several federal agencies send witnesses in an attempt to tackle what has become the economy’s greatest conundrum. Witnesses include Carol Galante, acting Federal Housing Administration commissioner and assistant HUD secretary for housing, Darius Kingsley, deputy chief of the Treasury Department’s Homeownership Preservation Office, and Neil Barofsky, senior fellow at the New York University School of Law, along with a host of others.

Jobless benies: Rep. Geoff Davis (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Ways and Means subcommittee on Human Resources, will hold a hearing reviewing unemployment benefit proposals in the president’s latest jobs plan and assessing whether they will help the long-term unemployed return to work.

{mossecondads}Witnesses will include a representative of the Department of Labor as well as other public- and private-sector experts on unemployment benefits and employment security policies designed to promote re-employment.

Veterans’ jobs: With the unemployment rate among young veterans reaching new highs, Senate Veterans Affairs Chairman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and ranking member Richard Burr (R-N.C.) will sit down with Microsoft, nonprofit organizations and veterans to discuss how to help unemployed veterans find skilled jobs.

Checking the polls: Quinnipiac University will be out with new poll numbers on President Obama’s handling of the economy on Thursday. The survey will ask about what should be done to rescue the U.S. Postal Service from bankruptcy. Various proposals are floating around Congress, including allowing massive layoffs and ending Saturday delivery and delivery to individual homes.

The lights are on: A whole bunch of new ideas could be generated at the Atlantic Washington Ideas Festival, with a full line-up of lawmakers ready to contribute, including House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), Vice President Biden and Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).

BREAKING WEDNESDAY:

That’s not really gonna cost ya: The Congressional Budget Office is projecting that President Obama’s jobs bill will increase spending by $175 billion over 10 years — less than the White House’s $447 billion price tag. There’s still some work to be done between CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation that will include the major tax cuts that were not in Wednesday’s score, The Hill’s Erik Wasson reports.

Freed free-trade deals: The three free-trade deals were cleared by House panel, the next step in Congress approving the long-delayed deals. Democrats still aren’t happy with the labor rights aspects of the Colombia deal, but the panel had plenty of support to approve all three agreements with South Korea, Panama and Colombia, The Hill’s Vicki Needham reports.

I wanna be a millionaire, er, maybe not: Senate Democrats jettisoned President Obama’s proposal to raise taxes on families making more than $250,000 a year, raising the threshold to $1 million in an attempt to win more Democratic votes. Democratic leaders say they want to impose a 5 percent surtax on the tax liability of millionaires, which would raise about $445 billion over 10 years — roughly the cost of Obama’s jobs proposal, The Hill’s Alexander Bolton reports.

ECONOMIC INDACATORS:

The Department of Labor releases its weekly filings for jobless benefits a day ahead of the government’s monthly figures for September.

WHAT YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED:

• Geithner: Wall Street critiques of White House ‘inexplicable’

• ADP report finds economy added 91,000 jobs in September

• Utah Republican enters repatriation debate

• Consumer Bureau not looking to ban new debit card fee

• Ohio Dem to Boehner: Check with your district on China bill

• Service sector expands at a slower pace in September

• GOP lawmaker presses Geithner for Dodd-Frank roadmap

• GOP: Obama never scoured budget ‘line by line’

• Sessions, Snowe target budget ‘tricks’ in new bill