Senate GOP blocks last-ditch votes on Biden finance nominees

The outgoing chair of the Senate Banking Committee is throwing in the towel on trying to confirm two key Biden administration appointees with just days before the upper chamber is set to leave for the year.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who lost his reelection bid last month, set up Banking panel votes for Caroline Crenshaw, a commissioner at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), to continue at the SEC, and for Gordon Ito to take a seat on the Financial Stability Oversight Council as its insurance expert.

But the committee canceled the executive session scheduled for Wednesday, which would have come before a general vote on the nominations on the Senate floor.

A committee aide told The Hill they ran out of time despite having the support to advance the nominations.

The cancellation came after Republicans blocked the committee from meeting last week, the aide said.

“Today, my Republican colleagues and I blocked Banking Democrats’ 11th-hour attempt to install an anti-crypto, climate activist at the SEC,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) said in a post on social media.

Hagerty took issue with Crenshaw’s position on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives as well as her stances on climate financing.

“She’s the person who pushes for DEI, climate activism. This was a last-minute, bad faith effort to come back and make our capital markets less competitive than ever,” he said in a video.

If the executive session had gone through, it wasn’t clear that the nominations would have made it through the Senate anyway due to possible opposition from Sens. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), along with Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who is viewed as an ally of Big Tech.

Manchin and Sinema voted against a procedural move last week that would have cleared the way for a Democratic majority on the National Labor Relations Board, a last-minute effort by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

More than 100,000 emails were sent to senators by tens of thousands of cryptocurrency owners and advocates over the past week, stressing their opposition to Crenshaw’s renomination on the SEC, according to pro-crypto nonprofit Stand With Crypto.

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who will chair the Banking panel next year, met Tuesday with President-elect Trump’s artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency czar David Sacks.

Scott said in a statement he was looking forward to “[developing] a regulatory framework for digital assets.”

Trump has also announced plans to nominate former SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins to chair the agency during his next administration. Atkins is expected to clear a GOP-controlled Senate with ample support.