(Reuters) – The U.S. Senate on Tuesday blocked President Donald Trump’s nomination of Judy Shelton to the board of the Federal Reserve, making her the latest in a string of failed nominees to the central bank.
Trump’s Republican Party has a 53-47 majority in the current Senate, but several were absent, including two who were quarantining due to exposure to COVID-19, and others joined Democrats in voting ‘no’ in the so-called cloture vote.
The vote was 47 to 50 with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell voting ‘no’ to preserve the option to reconsider later.
Shelton, an adviser to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign who has argued the nation would be better off returning to the gold standard, as recently as 2017 criticized the Fed’s power over money and financial markets as “quite unhealthy.” During her Senate confirmation process, she called the Fed’s bond-buying and zero rates in the last crisis “extreme.”
Her views on interest rates have moved in lockstep with Trump’s. She lambasted easy money before Trump’s presidency, but supported it after he took office, and has expressed skepticism over the Fed’s need to set policy independently from the president and Congress.
Other Trump Fed nominees that failed to be confirmed included former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, who later died of COVID-19.
(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle and Doina Chiacu; writing by Ann Saphir; editing by Jonathan Oatis and Edward Tobin)
