Senate Republicans today filibustered the nomination of former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to be the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. For months, the GOP has been insisting that it would not confirm any director for the Bureau until the Bureau’s structure is changed so as to weaken it significantly.

Since the GOP’s ultimate goal is to render the Bureau as toothless as possible, it makes sense for senators to portray the Bureau’s director as some out-of-control bureaucrat taking credit cards away from hard-working families. (This is the same tactic that they used during the debate over the creation of the Bureau.) On CNN today, a clearly fired-up Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) went so far as to call the Bureau’s director an “almighty god,” falsely claiming that the Bureau has no oversight:

We can not give a total czar, that even the President can’t suggest things to or can’t control, running this agency and determining the creditworthiness, the credit situation for people all over the country…You’re going to give a total czar total power, not even reportable to the President, not reportable to the appropriations processes and Congress, not reportable to Congress, total power over the credit of people throughout the country. That is not what our country’s about, we’ve never done that before, and yet that is how broadly this Dodd-Frank bill is…What we’re asking for is not unusual, it certainly isn’t flagrant, it certainly isn’t execessive, it’s having a board of directors that supervises this person so that this person is not an almighty god in bureaucratic dress.

Watch it:

Hatch’s rant would be amusing if it weren’t so wildly off-base. The Consumer Protection Bureau, unlike any of the other federal financial system regulators, can have it’s rules vetoed by a vote of what’s called the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), a panel of composed of the heads of the regulatory agencies along with the Treasury Secretary and the Federal Reserve Chairman. Literally no other regulator is subject to this kind of check.

Senate Republicans have been raking in millions in donations from Wall Street banks as they’ve continued to block Cordray’s confirmation. In the meantime, the only agency meant explicitly to protect consumers from financial industry excess — and which already has extraordinary restraints placed upon it — isn’t allowed to get off the ground. (And, at the end of the day, doesn’t Hatch know that it’s the Congressional Budget Office that’s actually god on Capitol Hill?)

European leaders are meeting in Brussels this week in yet another attempt to craft a plan that would deal with their ongoing fiscal crisis and preserve the Euro. The International Monetary Fund will likely play a role in a fiscal rescue plan, with Reuters reporting today that “Euro zone leaders will likely agree to boost the International Monetary Fund’s lending capacity with 150 billion euros.”

The involvement of the IMF has, like always, gotten Republicans in the U.S. Congress all bent out of shape, since the U.S. is an IMF contributor. According to the Republicans, the IMF lending money to European nations would be indirectly approving of those nations’ fiscal choices.

“Europe is going to default eventually, so why would you socialize their profligate spending?” asked Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK). “The reason we’re in the situation we’re in [is] because of excessive debt in the industrialized world,” agreed Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT).

A lot of mythology has been built up regarding why Europe is in the shape it’s in, but this theory leads the pack — Europe is collapsing because its governments were out-of-control spenders. However, there’s one problem with the theory. As Martin Wolf noted in the Financial Times, the claim that Europe’s most troubled nations spent their way into a crisis is simply not true:

Take a look at the average fiscal deficits of 12 significant (or at least revealing) eurozone members from 1999 to 2007, inclusive. Every country, except Greece, fell below the famous 3 per cent of gross domestic product limit. Focusing on this criterion would have missed all today’s crisis-hit members, except Greece. Moreover, the four worst exemplars, after Greece, were Italy and then France, Germany and Austria. Meanwhile, Ireland, Estonia, Spain and Belgium had good performances over these years. After the crisis, the picture changed, with huge (and unexpected) deteriorations in the fiscal positions of Ireland, Portugal and Spain (though not Italy). In all, however, fiscal deficits were useless as indicators of looming crises.

Now consider public debt. Relying on that criterion would have picked up Greece, Italy, Belgium and Portugal. But Estonia, Ireland and Spain had vastly better public debt positions than Germany. Indeed, on the basis of its deficit and debt performance, pre-crisis Germany even looked vulnerable. Again, after the crisis, the picture transformed swiftly. Ireland’s story is amazing: in just five years it will suffer a 93 percentage point jump in the ratio of its net public debt to GDP.

These charts show that, according to deficits and debt, countries like Spain and Ireland were acting much more responsibly than Germany and France — therefore it can’t have been deficits and debt that caused their problems. As The American Prospect’s Harold Myerson put it, “some of Europe’s current basket cases were actually running budget surpluses in the years before the Lehman meltdown. Ireland and Spain weren’t overspending at all — but the banks and investors speculating on their housing markets most certainly were.” What Europe needed was better regulation of its financial sector and a central bank willing to take the steps necessary to lessen the pain of the Great Recession, neither of which it had.

Republicans like to claim that if the United States doesn’t slash its budget to the bone, then it will wind up like Europe, careening towards a crisis. But it’s simply a myth that it was spending that got Europe into trouble — and austerity is certainly not going to save it.

Rachelle Grimmer and her two children were a struggling family living in a rundown trailer park. The Texas Department of Health and Human Services denied her application for food stamps, saying that she did not submit enough information. Grimmer went to a welfare office in Laredo to discuss her case.

What happened next was nothing short of horrific — after a seven-hour standoff with police, Grimmer shot her two children and then herself:

One of the children, 12-year-old Ramie Grimmer, died Wednesday night at a San Antonio hospital, Laredo police spokesman Joe Baeza said. The girl’s brother, 10, remained in critical condition.

Ramie appeared to post a chilling update on Facebook while her mother squared off with police Monday at a Laredo welfare office. Her profile was updated to read “may die 2day” just hours before authorities say her mother shot the girl and her brother, then killed herself to end the seven-hour standoff.

Relatives say Grimmer had a history of mental illness. It certainly seems to be a story of a mentally unstable woman who made a tragic decision. But the case also illustrates the depths of despair many families have been driven to during the economic downturn.

A record one in seven American families is currently on food stamps. In 2011, more than 46.2 million people received a total of $75.3 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

But many families in need of government aid often have difficulty getting it as more and more obstacles are erected. In 2008, the Food Research and Action Center noted that given the scope of hunger in America, “it is of great concern that the Food Stamp Program is missing one of every three eligible people.” That means less nutrition for needy families and less economic activity — because according to the USDA, every dollar in federal food stamp benefits generates nearly twice that in economic activity.

Republican governors and legislatures have enacted plans like mandatory drug testing of all welfare recipients to reduce the welfare rolls and make it more difficult to secure benefits, just as rising energy and food costs are exacerbating the squeeze on middle class families. They willfully ignore evidence that these requirements cost more money than they save and welfare recipients actually use drugs less than other groups.

The Obama administration added one more hurdle this week when it announced an aggressive campaign to crack down on SNAP fraud. That’s despite the fact that fraud in the food stamp program reached an all-time low in 2009, and the Agricultural Department, which administers the program, has won accolades from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) for already running an effective electronic anti-fraud system.

Perhaps the president is sensitive to politically-motivated attacks by GOP candidates that he is a “food stamp President” who has enabled more fraud during his tenure. But he should realize that Republicans are using the issue as a stalking horse for their war on the poor and government benefits. And given the tragic consequences of denying families aid, his focus on rooting out whatever fraud exists instead of making sure that people who qualify are getting it is seriously misplaced.

Karl Rove’s independent group Crossroads GPS is up with a new advertisement today, smearing Massachusetts senate candidate Elizabeth Warren (D) by insinuating that she was responsible for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the bank bailout that took place at the height of the financial crisis.

The ad blames Warren for “bailing out the same banks that caused the financial meltdown, bailouts that helped pay big bonuses to bank executives while middle class Americans lost out.” It closes by imploring the viewer to “tell Professor Warren we need jobs, not more bailouts and bigger government.”

The accusation that Warren is responsible for TARP, bank bailouts, or huge executive bonuses is beyond absurd. TARP and the bank bailouts were Republican ideas that began under President Bush. As Simon Johnson notes, Warren “has also been a strong supporter of all efforts to rein in Too Big To Fail banks, including by breaking them up.”

In fact, her work creating and heading up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau involved advocating directly on consumers’ behalf, a key check on the power of big banks. She also ran the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP, where her role was to track the money that was given to the banks. She was extremely critical of both the banks’ and Washington’s inability to accurately account for TARP money.

Viewers could be excused for thinking that Crossroads GPS might not even believe the veracity of its own ad, given that a month ago, they released a different ad accusing Warren of “sid[ing] with extreme left protests” and supporting the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

In fact, if Crossroads actually cared about fighting back against excessive bank power, they would release an ad critical of Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA), whose top 10 contributors include six banks or financial institutions, such as Goldman Sachs and Bain Capital. In total, the financial industry has contributed over $2.9 million to Brown’s campaign. It is unclear where Crossroads’ funding comes from because under existing election law, groups like Crossroads GPS are not required to disclose their donors, nor are there limits on how much those donors can give.

Crossroads GPS was one of the largest-spending outside groups in the 2010 election. There is little doubt that the group’s 2012 spending will dwarf its expenditures last year, using unlimited amounts of undisclosed money to run smears like the Warren ad against progressive candidates around the country.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Spencer Bachus (R-AL)

Last month, a 60 Minutes investigation revealed that House Financial Services Chairman Spencer Bachus (R-AL) made stock trades based on information that he received in private briefings during the financial crisis of 2008. Bachus’ trades reportedly netted him around $30,000.

Following the story, Congress suddenly found an interest in blocking its members from trading on information they receive in their official capacity. The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, which would ban this sort of activity, picked up dozens of co-sponsors, after it had languished for months with nearly no interest. Bachus was evidently ready and willing to move the bill forward, in an attempt to clean up his own image, but several other Republicans, including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), put the kibosh on that plan, according to Politico:

A day after Financial Services Committee Chairman Spencer Bachus said he would move forward on an insider-trading bill, Majority Leader Eric Cantor stopped him dead in his tracks.

In a Wednesday meeting described by one source as “extremely direct” and by another as “very blunt,” Cantor (R-Va.) ripped into Bachus, explaining in no uncertain terms that it was unacceptable for Bachus to mark up the bill without having run it by GOP leaders and other chairmen with jurisdiction over its provisions. The Alabama Republican abruptly canceled the vote, which was scheduled for next week. [...]

“We’re not going to cover Spencer’s ass by passing a half-baked bill,” one Republican member of the panel told POLITICO. “Even Barney Frank didn’t pass it in his two terms as chairman and Dem[ocrats] are the lead sponsors. It’s all about Spencer’s bad political position, not the contents of the policy.”

“The public has an absolute right to demand that the people they elect to represent them in Congress conduct themselves according to the highest ethical standards and do not seek to profit from their positions,” Bachus said while announcing his intention to move the legislation forward. However, it seems that his leadership doesn’t quite see things that way.

The Senate today is scheduled to vote on the nomination of former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the new agency created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. It’s unlikely, at this point, that Democrats have enough votes to overcome a Republican filibuster. Forty-five Republican senators have pledged to block any nominee until structural changes are made to the Bureau that would undermine its effectiveness.

Wall Street banks have been fighting the new agency tooth and nail, and as it turns out, the 45 Republicans who have vowed to block the agency’s director have been lavished with donations from the financial services industry, as the Public Campaign Action Fund noted:

– The 44 Senate Republicans who signed a letter in May pledging to filibuster any CFPB nominee (plus Sen. Dean Heller who later added his name once appointed to the Senate) have received over $6.5 million from the financial industry in 2011 and nearly $125.6 million over their careers.

– Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), the ranking member of the Senate Banking committee (and lead signer of the letter), has received at least $81,850 in 2011 and $6.2 million from the FIRE sector throughout his career.

Shelby, in fact, received a $5,000 donation from Goldman Sachs the day after he denounced the Bureau as “dangerous.”

So far, just one Republican has broken ranks and said that he will support Cordray: Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA), who is facing a strong challenge from Prof. Elizabeth Warren. As ThinkProgress’ Ian Millhiser has noted, if the GOP continues to filibuster Cordray, President Obama can always break out the Roosevelt precedent, in order to allow Cordray to do his job and allow the Bureau to begin the work for which it was created.