The investment banker nominated for a top position at the Treasury Department has removed his name from consideration, handing a victory to Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the other liberal Democrats who opposed his candidacy.
Antonio Weiss, the head of investment banking at Lazard, told President Obama to withdraw his candidacy for undersecretary of domestic finance, Politico reported Monday afternoon.
Nevertheless, Weiss will serve as counselor to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, a position that would not require Senate confirmation.
“I do not believe that the Treasury Department would be well served by the lengthy confirmation process my renomination would likely entail,” Weiss told Obama in a letter, according to Politico.
Warren, the Massachusetts liberal, had cast Weiss’ nomination as part of a larger pattern of Wall Street exercising undue influence in Washington.
“It’s all about the revolving door — that well-oiled mechanism that sends Wall Street executives to make policies in the government and that sends government policymakers straight to Wall Street,” Warren said in December.
Now Weiss will not serve in the number-three post in the Treasury. As undersecretary for domestic finance, he would have taken the lead in managing the Treasury’s debt issuance and management of the $18 trillion national debt as well as oversight of regulation of finance.
He will, however, still have a role in advising Lew as a special counselor. Warren herself served as a special counselor at the Obama Treasury in 2010 and 2011 when she was helping to set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Weiss is the second high-profile nominee for a financial regulatory position that liberal Democrats in Congress have successfully opposed. In 2013, Democrats including Warren and other progressives pre-emptively staked out their opposition to Harvard professor and former Obama adviser Larry Summers as a candidate for Federal Reserve chairman.
Obama reportedly favored Summers as a candidate to be the top central banker, but ultimately nominated Janet Yellen after progressives expressed concern about what they called Summers’ close ties to financial firms.
