Senate and House Democrats have lobbied since July for Obama to choose Yellen. Nineteen Democratic senators and one independent -- led by Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown -- signed a July 26 letter to the White House praising the former president of the San Francisco Fed and urging the president to nominate her. A group of female House Democrats led by Maxine Waters of California also backed Yellen in a July 31 letter to Obama.
Sarah Binder, who researches the relationship between the Fed and Congress, said she doesn’t expect Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, will have “a hard time” getting the 60 votes required to confirm Yellen.
Republicans, who have criticized the Fed’s policies for risking inflation, so far have largely been absent from the debate about Bernanke’s successor.
Summers’s chances were derailed after at least four Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee, which has jurisdiction over Fed nominees, said they wouldn’t support him: Brown, Jon Tester of Montana, Oregon’s Jeff Merkley and Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren.
‘Quiet Affairs’
“We don’t really have a modern example of similar push back against a nominee,” said Binder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Most of the transitions “have been pretty quiet affairs.”
Binder said Summers’s history as an advocate of deregulation was the key to his demise, given the public’s disdain for bank bailouts and concern that the problem of so- called too-big-to-fail institutions hasn’t been resolved, even after the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-overhaul legislation expanded the Fed’s supervisory powers.
When Summers, 58, withdrew, he cited a potentially “acrimonious” confirmation process.
“The hard work was done by a handful of liberal Democrats in the Senate caucus who really, intensely disagreed with his stand on financial regulation,” Binder said.
‘Obnoxious Views’