Steven Mnuchin is not likely to receive much Democratic support in Monday evening’s Senate Finance Committee vote on his nomination to be treasury secretary.
Two Democrats announced Monday afternoon that they would vote against the former investor and banker: Sens. Mark Warner of Virginia and Tom Carper of Delaware.
Those two Democrats, relative moderates on the panel, joined Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio in announcing that they wouldn’t vote to advance Mnuchin’s candidacy.
In announcing on Twitter that he would vote against Mnuchin, Carper cited Mnuchin’s role as the head of a bank with a controversial record on foreclosures.
Outside liberals have sought to pressure senators to vote against Mnuchin based on his management of foreclosures, airing ads with one former customer who lost her house in the senators’ states.
One Republican, Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada, also appeared skeptical of Mnuchin’s bank and its handling of foreclosures.
Warner gave a different rationale for voting against Mnuchin. He said that he worried that Mnuchin would not enforce banking regulations and that he would use “dynamic scoring” to assess the revenue impact of tax cuts. Dynamic scoring involves incorporating projections of added revenues from faster economic growth into the budgetary cost of change in tax law, which Democrats say allows for fiscally irresponsible tax cuts.
