Nominations

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, now on a different matter, this week, our colleagues want a second run on some controversial nominees who stalled out last month.

Today, Senate Democrats will try again to confirm Professor Lisa Cook to the Federal Reserve Board. Professor Cook has no proven expertise in monetary economics at all, much less fighting inflation. One of her main supposed qualifications for this position is that she sits on the regional Fed Board in Chicago. The problem is, she was literally appointed to that position a few days before she was nominated for this one.

Professor Cook is a proven partisan who has promoted leftwing conspiracy theories and called for a fellow academic to be fired because that person did not support defunding the police. The American people deserve an independent, nonpartisan inflation fighter for this important post.

Likewise, the Federal Trade Commission is an important Agency that gets wide latitude to oversee our private sector. The American people need its Commissioners to be levelheaded experts who will put aside ideological ax-grinding.

The two current Commissioners who were appointed by a Republican President were so qualified and uncontroversial, the Senate approved each of them on a voice vote. But to serve as their newest colleague, President Biden has picked a radical partisan named Alvaro Bedoya.

Mr. Bedoya is such a poor fit that the first time Leader Schumer tried to shut down debate on his nomination, he lacked the votes and had to call it off. But Democrats want this hardcore partisan confirmed very badly, so here we are once again.

Mr. Bedoya has publicly attacked police and law enforcement and demanded that our country not enforce--not enforce--our immigration laws. He has called for States to essentially nullify Federal immigration law, saying:

Maryland police have no business working with ICE [and] I think it's high time that state legislators understand that they can do something about this.

He has volunteered statements that align with ``defund the police,'' demanding that none of the Democrats' trillions in stimulus waste should go to provide for law enforcement.

Mr. Bedoya's social media feeds have read like the rantings of a far- left activist with no aspiration to ever receive Senate confirmation.

He has embraced socialized medicine, critical race theory, and cracking down on citizens' Second Amendment rights. He has launched political attacks on current Senators and called the National Republican Party Convention a--listen to this--``White supremacist rally''--a ``White supremacist rally,'' the Republican National Convention.

The rabid partisanship is not just an extracurricular activity. We know Mr. Bedoya would apply it specifically to the work of the FTC. He is already on the record calling for the elimination of longstanding bipartisan FTC policy statements. He supports excluding minority party Commissioners from investigations.

This nominee would not be fit to neutrally oversee major economic decisions, no matter what the makeup of the Senate was. But he is an essentially foolish choice--foolish--when the American people handed this administration a 50-50 Senate.

I would urge my colleagues on both sides to stop this awful nomination so the President can reconsider and send us somebody suitable.

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