We have yet another casualty in the vetting wars:
Democratic sources say that H. Rodgin Cohen, a partner in the New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, and the leading candidate for Deputy Treasury Secretary, has withdrawn from consideration.
….Democratic sources said that an issue arose in the final stages of the vetting process.
Cohen had risen to the top after the withdrawal last week of expected deputy treasury secretary pick Annette Nazareth. As one source put it, “it’s back to the drawing board.”
Without knowing what the “issue” was, I guess there’s no way to comment on this. But if it didn’t come up until the final stages of the vetting process, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s substantively minor but politically dangerous, the kind of thing that grandstanding senators will turn into a cause célèbres even though they know it’s fundamentally trivial. And when they’re done, they’ll go back to asking why Obama isn’t taking the financial crisis more seriously.
Bah. Get the Senate out of this whole process. Let ’em confirm cabinet heads and leave it at that. Do they really need to pretend to care about every deputy and assistant deputy too?
