By David Morgan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Senate on Tuesday is set to vote to bring President Joe Biden’s nomination of economist Lisa Cook to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors to the chamber’s floor, a key procedural action that would permit a final confirmation vote after the Senate Banking Committee deadlocked over her appointment.
The move is intended to discharge the committee from further consideration of Cook’s nomination. Approval of the resolution, which may require Vice President Kamala Harris to cast a tie-breaking vote in the evenly split Senate, would allow a confirmation vote on Cook to proceed.
Republicans on the banking panel refused on March 16 to endorse Cook, an economics professor at Michigan State University, whom Biden picked to be the first Black female Fed governor.
The committee did approve Biden’s renomination of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, the promotion of Fed Governor Lael Brainard to Fed vice chair, and the nomination of Philip Jefferson, an economist and the dean of faculty at Davidson College in North Carolina, to the Fed’s board.
Powell, Brainard and Jefferson also await confirmation votes. Biden’s nominee to be the Fed’s vice chair for supervision, Sarah Bloom Raskin, withdrew her name from consideration after Republicans on the banking committee blocked a vote on her appointment and a key Senate Democrat signaled he would not support her.
(Reporting by David Morgan; Additional reporting by Moira Warburton; Editing by Dan Burns and Paul Simao)
