Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Kathy Kraninger, refused to answer for her part in one of the most egregious debacles to date of the Trump administration: the zero-tolerance policy that ripped little children from their families at the border. She twisted and dodged and refused to acknowledge her role.
She did precisely the same thing when pressed, again, by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as to her single qualifications for the job to which she's been nominated: as an official with the Office of Management and Budget, she drew up the budget for it. That budget cuts $147 million from the agency, a 23 percent cut. And Kraninger repeatedly failed to tell Warren how she would cut that much out of the agency. Staff? Travel? Enforcement? No answer. Kraninger also repeatedly attempted to push off responsibility for the cuts by calling it "the president's budget request," as if she wasn't the person who drew it up.
It wasn't just Warren who came up against Kraninger's stonewalling, and who came away convinced that she is not at all qualified for this job. She wouldn't even explain what her role at the OMB has been. "I am trying to get an answer from you, and I just can't. And this is maddening," said Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii after his round of fruitless questioning. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada came up against the same brick wall. "If you can’t even tell us what you’re doing on a day-to-day basis," Cortez Masto lamented, "how can we expect you to be accountable at CFPB?"
The hearing proceeded Thursday even after committee Democrats tried to get it postponed because the administration has not been forthcoming about all of these questions. What was Kraninger's responsibility in implementing the zero tolerance immigration policy? What role did she have in the administration's utterly botched response in Puerto Rico to Hurricane Maria? That delay came from the Democratic committee members as a whole, including red state Sens. Jon Tester (MT), Joe Donnelly (IN), Heidi Heitkamp (ND), and Doug Jones (AL).
In fact, Heitkamp had the best luck getting an answer from Kraninger, finding "that she has never worked in any financial capacity, either at a bank or a credit union, or as a regulator." Never had anything to do with overseeing or examining financial institutions of any kind. "The point I'm trying to make is that this is a highly technical job," Heitkamp said. "We ought to have somebody who has experience … and who has empathy."
That's definitely not going to be Kraninger. From the looks of things, there will be Democratic unity in opposing this one—and another total abdication by Republicans who really only want to confirm people who will destroy the institutions they're put in charge of.