Republicans today, as Travis Waldron noted, continued promising to filibuster the nomination of former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to be the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as Cordray made his first appearance before Congress. A spokesman for Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), the Senate Banking Committee’s ranking member, said that “opposition to or support of Mr. Cordray’s nomination will become relevant as soon as the President agrees to make the structural changes we’ve requested.” “Until then, Sen. Shelby and his colleagues stand firmly behind the statement they expressed in their May letter: No accountability, no confirmation,” he added.

Few lawmakers have spent as much time trying to block the creation and then implementation of the CFPB as Shelby. And as the Public Campaign Action Fund noted today, some of Wall Street’s biggest players have rewarded Shelby for his efforts:

A day after Sen. Shelby published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about his opposition to Cordray, the Alabama Senator’s political action committee (PAC), Defend America, received a $5,000 donation from the Goldman Sachs PAC and $1,500 from the PAC for MFS, a Boston-based investment firm.

In that op-ed, Shelby called the CFPB “dangerous” for businesses and said that its “only a matter of time before [the CFPB's] concentration of power is abused or misused to the detriment of American businesses and consumers.” Of course, the timing could just be coincidental, but during the 2010 election cycle, securities and investment firms were Shelby’s top contributors, giving more than $1 million to his campaign and his leadership PAC.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) continued his attempt to draw contrast between his and President Obama’s economic experience today as he delivered a speech in Nevada detailing his plan for job creation, just two days before Obama will provide his own version in front of Congress. Romney advanced the speech with an editorial in USA Today, providing a rough, if vague, outline of his forthcoming speech.

One of the tenets of Romney’s plan is reducing the federal workforce, which he claims has exploded in size and needs to be scaled back. In the editorial, Romney writes that “while the private sector shed 1.8 million jobs since Barack Obama took office, the federal workforce grew by 142,500, or almost 7%. A rollback is urgently required.” Pat Garofalo noted today why that position (among others) is wrong. But according to ABC News, Romney’s position is also hypocritical. During his term as governor, the number of Massachusetts state workers not only grew, it grew twice as fast as the private sector:

When Romney took office in January 2003, the Massachusetts state government employed 112,000 workers, according to the state Department of Labor and Workforce Development.

Four years later, the ranks of Massachusetts state employees had grown by 3,000, or a 2.6 percent increase. (Over the same period, nonfarm employment grew just 1.2 percent.)

Romney has repeatedly made it clear that he does not consider government workers part of the “real economy,” the one that has provided him with the real job creating experience that he says Obama lacks. He has also made a habit of ignoring his public sector experience, particularly his state’s ranking 47th in job creation during his term as governor, and he continually misstates the facts about public sector employment and compensation.

Now, given this bit of hypocrisy, perhaps it is time for Romney to stop including layoffs — an area in which he has plenty of experience — in his jobs plan and instead start focusing on actual job creation, an area in which is record is much less impressive.

President Obama will lay out his latest jobs plan before a joint session of Congress on Thursday, in the wake of a report that showed zero net jobs were created last month. Unemployment has remained above 9 percent, while unemployment amongst African Americans is at a 27-year high.

Obama said yesterday that he aims to “present a far-reaching jobs plan aimed at winning bipartisan support.” However, up to this point, Republicans have been utterly uninterested in supporting job creation policies, preferring to slash and burn the federal budget and force the layoffs of hundreds of thousands of public sector workers.

But while the GOP may be firmly against progressive job creation measures, the public is assuredly not. According to two polls released today, the public supports government-backed measures to bring down the unemployment rate.

First, 51 percent of respondents in a Politico-George Washington University poll said that they favor “a large scale federally subsidized nationwide construction program putting Americans back to work building roads, bridges, schools, and hospitals.” Just 21 percent of respondents oppose such an idea.

Meanwhile, 62 percent of respondents in a new NBC-Wall Street Journal poll approve of the federal government “paying for long-term unemployed workers to train at private companies for eight weeks, and then giving the companies an option to hire them.” A plurality of respondents approve of funding a road construction bill, extending unemployment benefits, and extending the payroll tax cut that was included in last December’s tax deal.

And it’s not only on the job creation front that the progressive agenda garners widespread support. As NBC’s First Read noted today:

With the first Super Committee hearing this Thursday, the NBC/WSJ poll also shows what course the public wants it to take. The good news for Obama/Democrats — it’s on their turf. Per the poll, 60% say it would be acceptable if the Super Committee comes up with a plan to reduce the deficit by ending the so-called Bush tax cuts for families earning $250,000 or more per year. Moreover, 56% say it would be acceptable if its plan reduces the deficit by a combination of tax increases and spending cuts. By comparison, just 37% believe it’s acceptable for the Super Committee to reduce the deficit by only cutting spending and not raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy. And only 20% say it’s acceptable to lower the deficit by reducing spending on Medicare.

As Steve Benen put it, “for all the talk about the center-right nation, and for all of the president’s troubles in the polls, most of the public is still on board with what Democrats are proposing, and have no use for what the GOP is selling.”

Earlier this year, Ohio state legislators passed a controversial bill limiting the collective bargaining rights of public employees unions. Included in the SB5 legislation is a provision to eliminate small automatic pay increases for state workers, including teachers, cops, and firefighters.

Ohio Republicans justified the move by arguing that state needed to shrink the size of government and save money in public employee contracts. However, when it comes to the salaries of Republican staffers, Ohio Senate President Tom Niehaus (R) was not nearly as concerned with fiscal discipline.

A new investigation by the preeminent Ohio blog Plunderbund shows that rather than leading by example and asking his own employees to tighten their belts like they did public employees with SB5, Niehaus has been giving major retroactive pay increases to his staff. Those raises were as high as 37 percent:

Plunderbund research reveals that GOP Senate President Tom Niehaus, leader of the brain trust behind a bill to strip benefits from rank and file public employees, and champion of a budget that makes painful cuts to nearly every program in the state, has now committed the ultimate act of hypocrisy. [...]

Now, in the most recent move, quietly, effective with the first paycheck of the new fiscal year, Niehaus has followed the lead of the Governor by rewarding his top staff with enormous taxpayer-funded pay increases. His Chief of Staff, Assistant Chief of Staff, Finance Director and Senate Clerk all received a $15,000 yearly pay increase. The Deputy Finance Directory received a whopping $23,005 increase. [...]

Furthermore, the increases were retroactive, such that on July 16, these same staffers each took home checks containing 26 weeks of back pay at the higher rate, as if their raises had been in place since January. [...]

So, after passing SB5 which eliminates automatic 3% pay increases for state workers, the Senate handed their own staff raises ranging from 12 to 37%.

After SB5 was signed into law, one consequence has been that public workers are retiring in droves in order to avoid the new legislation’s onerous pension reforms.

Still, many in the Buckeye State are fighting back. A major opposition effort emerged, gathering nearly 1.3 million signatures to get a repeal referendum on the November ballot – one million signature more than necessary to hold a vote. A poll in May found 54 percent of Ohioans want to repeal the law, outpacing supporters by 18 points. Even Gov. John Kasich (R) has recognized SB5′s unpopularity and offered to sit down and negotiate the bill with labor organizers in advance of of November’s repeal vote.

Of course, all public employees should receive adequate compensation for the important work they do, not just Republican Senate staffers. For Niehaus to cut firefighter’s pay while giving major raises to his own staff isn’t just unfair; it reeks of hypocrisy.

Former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray is scheduled to appear in front of the Senate Banking Committee today for the first time since President Obama nominated him to become the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The GOP, meanwhile, has promised to continue their obstruction of anything related to the agency without considering Cordray’s nomination on its merits.

Republicans have requested sweeping structural changes to weaken the agency since it was signed into law as part of financial regulatory reform, demanding that it be run by a board instead of a director, that its budget be subject to congressional approval, and that other regulators have more power than the bureau itself. That means Cordray’s appearance today is an “interview for a job he is unlikely to get,” as the Banking Committee’s ranking Republican, Sen. Richard Shelby (AL), insisted that hearings related to the agency are irrelevant until Obama and Democrats relent on the issues most important to Wall Street banks the CFPB is meant to regulate:

“Opposition to or support of Mr. Cordray’s nomination will become relevant as soon as the President agrees to make the structural changes we’ve requested,” said Jonathan Graffeo, the spokesman for Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.). “Until then, Sen. Shelby and his colleagues stand firmly behind the statement they expressed in their May letter: No accountability, no confirmation.”

Republicans have used various methods to fight the CFPB, harassing Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren (who conceived the idea of the bureau) in Congressional hearings and refusing to allow the Senate to recess in order to avoid recess appointments. That obstruction, which will assuredly continue in Cordray’s hearing today, has been helped by the financial industry’s intense lobbying efforts to block implementation of the reforms and the CFPB in particular. The financial industry, in fact, has spent as much lobbying to block implementation of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law as it did to block the passage of the law itself.

The GOP has benefited from its continued obstruction. The 10 Republican members of the Banking Committee have taken in $31 million from the financial, insurance, and real estate sectors in their Senate careers. Shelby himself has received more than $6.2 million, including more than $1 million from commercial banks, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Every GOP committee member has signed onto Shelby’s legislation to repeal financial regulatory reform.

Democrats, however, are gearing up for a fight over Cordray’s nomination. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) slammed Republican obstruction in an op-ed last week. Banking Committee Chairman Tim Johnson (D-ND), meanwhile, plans to unleash on the Republican Banking Committee members today, blasting them for holding Cordray and consumers hostage. “The purpose of today’s hearing should be to consider whether Mr. Cordray is qualified for [the] job…Instead, a vocal minority is playing games with the process and holding Mr. Cordray’s nomination hostage,” Johnson will say, according to prepared remarks obtained by Politico. “This political gamesmanship is preventing Americans from receiving the consumer protections they deserve.”

Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney today is unveiling a jobs plan in Nevada, which he previewed in a USA Today op-ed. “We must once again unleash the tremendous economic potential of the American people. The contrast between what the Obama administration has done and what I would do as president could not be starker,” Romney claims.

For the most part, the op-ed revives Romney’s stump speech, which focuses on his career at Bain Capital (a buyout firm) and a critique of the Obama administration’s tax and budget policies. But he also levels several factually challenged charges, while promoting many of the tired supply-side policy ideas that have been a staple of Republican policy for years. Here is a fact-check of Romney’s piece:

ROMNEY: “Marginal income tax rates and tax rates on savings and investment must be kept low. Further, taxes on interest, dividends and capital gains for middle-income taxpayers should be eliminated.”

REALITY: Taxes are the lowest they’ve been in 60 years, far lower than under several Republican presidents. Taxes on dividends and capital gains are far below the level at which they were under President Reagan. Furthermore, 68.3 percent of the capital gains tax is paid by the richest 1 percent of Americans, while the bottom 95 percent of Americans pay just 10 percent of them, so it is unclear how Romney thinks a capital gains tax cut can be fashioned as a middle class tax break.

ROMNEY: “Our corporate tax rate is among the world’s highest. It leaves U.S. firms at a competitive disadvantage and induces them to park their profits abroad, benefiting the rest of the world at our expense.”

REALITY: While the U.S. corporate tax rate is high on paper, once all the credits, deductions, and loopholes are accounted for, the U.S. has the second-lowest corporate taxes in the developed world.

ROMNEY: “President Obama has vastly expanded the regulatory reach of government. The federal government has estimated the price tag for its regulations at $1.75 trillion.”

REALITY: This is a bogus number favored by the big business lobby, and widely cited by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It comes from a study that, according to John Irons of the Economic Policy Institute, “contains basic conceptual mistakes and relies on extraordinarily poor data.” “Its results should neither be used as a valid measure of the economic costs of regulation nor as a guide for policy,” he said.

ROMNEY: “I will not tolerate federal intrusions of the kind that the National Labor Relations Board initiated when it filed suit against Boeing for opening a plant in a right-to-work state.”

REALITY: The NLRB suit against Boeing has nothing to do with the company opening a plant in a so-called “right-to-work” state, but that the company, by its own admission, shifted production from Washington state to South Carolina in retaliation against workers for striking, which is a violation of the National Labor Relations Act.

ROMNEY: “Tellingly, while the private sector shed 1.8 million jobs since Barack Obama took office, the federal workforce grew by 142,500, or almost 7%. A rollback is urgently required.”

REALITY: This is a favorite stat for conservatives, but it isn’t true. The GOP engineers the stat by leaving out all of the jobs lost by the U.S. Postal Service. As Politifact noted, “If the postal workers cuts were included, the overall increase in employees under Obama would be about 40,000, or a modest 1.4 percent increase in the workforce.” The federal workforce is also smaller than it was 20 years ago. Overall, the public sector has lost 600,000 during the Great Recession.