Paulson's Speech Brings Results Already

A funny thing happened on the eve of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's unveiling of the Bush administration's "Blueprint for Financial Regulatory Reform" this morning.

On Friday, the White House announced its intent to nominate two Democrats to fill vacancies at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The nominally five-person commission has been operating with three members, all Republican, since the end of January. That's when the last remaining Democrat, Anne Nazareth, returned to the private sector.

The two nominees are Elisse B. Walter, a longtime federal regulator who is now a senior executive vice president of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, and Luis Aguilar, a partner at the Atlanta law firm of McKenna, Long & Aldridge and former general counsel of INVESCO, a mutual fund company.

Walter will fill Nazareth's term, which expires June 2012, and Aguilar will fill the position vacated by Roel Campos and serve until June 2010.

These names are no surprise, and in fact Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada forwarded them to the White House last November. After that, even amid a subprime meltdown, the nominees became pawns in a fight over stalled Bush appointees to other agencies.

In fact, President Bush made a show of all his stalled nominees at a White House breakfast last month. To the reporters invited to sit in, he mentioned the delay of "three highly qualified nominees" to the Federal Reserve's board of governors, but made not one mention of the S.E.C.

At the time, Reid made a statement on the Senate floor in which he surmised that a Republican-only S.E.C. "perhaps suits the administration." But Reid met in mid-March with White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolton to work out a compromise on nominees.

Now it's up to the Senate Banking Committee to confirm Walter and Aguilar.

by Karen Donovan