Senate panel advances CMU professor for Federal Reserve post
WASHINGTON –— A Carnegie Mellon professor’s controversial nomination to the Federal Reserve Board narrowly advanced after a Senate Banking Committee vote Thursday.
The party-line opposition to Marvin Goodfriend’s nomination seems to suggest a new Democratic strategy in handling confirmations, which typically receive bipartisan support.
Mr. Goodfriend’s nomination now heads to the Senate floor, where final confirmation remains uncertain amid concerns about his opposition to bond programs and his inaccurate prediction in 2008 that Fed programs he opposed would spur inflation.
Those are some of the reasons Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, gave for opposing the nomination in committee.
“Stakes are too high for workers. We can’t take a chance on someone with a decade-long record of prioritizing hypothetical inflation over real people losing jobs,” said Mr. Brown, the committee’s ranking Democrat. “I applaud his long academic career studying monetary policy, but I can’t brush aside comments and concerns about Dr. Goodfriend’s long-held and often-repeated views.”
The professor’s positions, though, were consistent with views of many other conservative economists at the time who attributed the weak labor market to structural problems — that is, a skills deficit rather than a jobs deficit, said Dean Baker, senior economist for the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Thirteen Republicans, including Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., voted for confirmation. Twelve Democrats opposed.
President Donald Trump nominated him last month to a 14-year term following the resignation of Sarah Bloom Raskin.
Mr. Goodfriend is a professor of economics in CMU’s Tepper School of Business and previously worked as policy adviser and director of research for the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.
Mr. Goodfriend will need at least some support from reluctant Democrats if he is to get the 60 votes required for confirmation.
If Democrats hold firm, it would be a departure from their tradition of allowing confirmation of Republican nominees so long as they haven’t been involved in major scandals.
“They seem to prepared to use his track record as a basis for rejecting his nomination. I think that is a good thing,” Mr. Baker said. “Fed governors hold a very important position.”
It remains unclear whether the Democrats’ approach to the Goodfriend nomination is a one-off or whether it marks a turning point in caucus strategy moving forward. Princeton University political scientist Lauren Wright suggests it’s the latter. It can take Congress a year or more to adjust to a new administration. Now in the administration’s second year, Democrats have adapted to — and adopted, too, — the president’s obstructionist style, Ms. Wright said. “They seem to be putting up more of a fight, and this is an area where Republicans put up a lot of fight when Obama was president,” she said, recalling their unwavering stance on U.S. Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland. “Republicans have had a hard-core style of governing when it comes to nominees, and if Democrats want to be able to get what they want in the Trump era they may have to change their strategy.”