How Mitch McConnell May Have Given Us America’s Most Progressive President
By 
A useful reminder that Elizabeth Warren would probably be a law professor right now if it wasn’t for Republicans denying her the job she first wanted:
But Ms. Warren would soon learn that hers was borrowed power — power delegated by the president, and for only a year. By the spring of 2011, the opposition to Ms. Warren becoming permanent director was unbending. Republican senators said they would never confirm her; so did Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, a conservative Democrat.
Mr. Nelson, who is supporting Mr. Biden in the Democratic primary, said in an interview that he worried about empowering someone he saw as a champion of “runaway government.”
“I was very concerned about somebody who had been such a strong advocate for a government bureau that had virtually no control,” Mr. Nelson said.
Mr. Reid said Republican opposition sealed Ms. Warren’s fate.
“The Republicans stopped her from getting that job,” he said. “That was her job.”
And also reminds us that Summers and especially Geithner were terrible:
Ms. Warren was elated but uneasy. The financial industry was mobilizing, warning that a new regulator would damage the economic recovery. And Ms. Warren was concerned about two of Mr. Obama’s lieutenants: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Lawrence H. Summers, who helmed the National Economic Council. She had profound philosophical disagreements with both men, who believed that her savage criticism of the bank bailouts revealed a misunderstanding of the role of Wall Street in the fragile economic recovery.
“Tim and Larry were not fans of this agency,” Ms. Warren said. “I heard more than once from Senate and House staffers that they had proposed scrapping it in return for some other concession that they cared more about.”
Of Mr. Obama, she said: “I never worried about the president. I was worried about his advisers.”
Particularly that an ambitious legislative agenda is not happening with the next Congress even if Dems get the White House back, Warren’s indispensible role in conceiving, creating, and then working at the CFPB is critical information about how she might govern.