The Senate has confirmed Lisa Cook, President Joe Biden’s nominee to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Cook will become the first Black woman to join the Fed board.
The final vote was 51-50 with a complete partisan split and Vice President Kamala Harris joining fellow Democrats to break the tie in Cook’s favor.
Republicans in the Senate maintained that, despite Cook’s background in government and economics and being a professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University, they believe her to lack the necessary qualifications to hold the position.
“[Cook’s] credentials are impressive, but they do not, by themselves, qualify her, or anyone, to serve on the Fed —especially at a time when we need a Fed that will tackle the 40-year high inflation that is hurting American families every day,” Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), ranking member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, said during debate over Cook’s confirmation.
“According to the White House, her main qualification on monetary policy is services as a member of the Chicago Fed’s board of directors,” Toomey continued. “But she only joined the Chicago Fed’s board two weeks before President Biden nominated her to serve as a Fed governor.”
Democratic Senators have maintained their stalwart support for Cook’s nomination.
"Cook is unquestionably qualified and possesses bipartisan support from top economists, former Fed governors, bankers and civil rights organizations,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), chair of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs committee, said. “Despite her broad support, a small but loud minority have wrongly claimed that Lisa Cook doesn't meet the standards for this position -- standards that only seem to apply for certain nominees.”
Biden had previously stated that he intended, through his nominations, to make the Fed the most diverse it had ever been. In his statement regarding Cook’s nomination, Biden said that her and other nominees would provide “diversity of thought and perspective never seen before on the Board of Governors.”
This was the second vote to break a Republican filibuster of Cook. The previous attempt failed in the evenly divided Senate due to a number of Democrats being absent.