Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has cleared one major hurdle on his path to a second term as the nation’s top banker, and now must overcome strong opposition in the full Senate after winning an endorsement in a key Senate committee.
In a 16-7 vote Thursday, the Senate Banking Committee voted to send Bernanke’s confirmation to the full Senate where he is expected to win the necessary votes, but not without some showmanship from opponents.
Four of 10 Republicans on the committee voted for Bernanke, who was first nominated by Republican President George W. Bush. One Democrat, Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley, voted against the confirmation.
Some credit Bernanke, and the extraordinary actions he took during the financial meltdown, with preventing the second Great Depression. Others say that he should have prevented the crisis in the first place by recognizing the housing bubble before it burst. Critics also contend that the actions the Fed took to stabilize the financial markets were huge giveaways to Wall Street at the expense of average Americans.
Those critics who also happen to be members of the Senate Banking Committee used the forum to take shots at the Fed Chairman who was recently named Time Magazine’s 2009 Person of the Year.
The toughest criticism came from Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY), a longtime critic of both the Fed and Bernanke.
Bernanke "may wonder if he really wants to be honored by an organization that has previously named people like Joseph Stalin, Yasser Arafat, Adolf Hitler, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and Vladimir Putin as their Person of the Year," he said. "But I congratulate him and hope he at least turns out better than those guys."
Even those that supported his nomination, had strong words for the beleaguered Fed Chairman.
Sen. Chris Dodd said that while he supported Bernanke’s nomination, he also wants to take away some of the central bank’s power and make it more transparent.
"I strongly support this nomination. But I want to be clear with my support comes my insistence that we carefully examine the role of the institution that runs the risk of becoming too complicated to succeed," the panel's chairman, Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd, said.