WASHINGTON — The Senate nomination hearing for Richard Cordray, who's tabbed to become the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has been postponed until Sept. 6.
The hearing before the Senate Banking Committee was originally scheduled for Thursday. But with the Senate going on recess for the rest of the month following the passage of a debt ceiling bill, the hearing was postponed.
Cordray, a former Ohio attorney general who heads the enforcement division at the nascent CFPB, was nominated for the bureau's top job last month by President Obama.
His nomination hearing is expected to be contentious. Forty-four Senate Republicans, enough to filibuster a nomination, have vowed to block any nominee to head the CFPB unless Democrats agree to make changes to the agency's structure.
Cordray was hired at the CFPB by Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard Law School professor who first proposed the idea of a stand-alone consumer financial protection agency, and was charged with getting the agency up and running.
After being passed over for the director's job, Warren is returning to Harvard this month. She is reported to be considering a run for the U.S. Senate in 2012 against Republican Scott Brown.
