I don’t think there’s been a complete slate on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors during the entire Obama Administration. But that would end if they somehow got these two economists past the Senate for confirmation.

The White House appears finally ready to make a number of financial regulatory picks, readying nominees to replace the heads of the FDIC and the OCC, who have left or are in the process of leaving.

In his withdrawal announcement, Diamond laments the “distorted” confirmation process, which caused him to have to be renominated on two separate occasions, and the “little understanding of monetary policy” from those who conduct oversight of it, i.e. the Senate. But the saddest part of this is that Diamond is on point as far as the near-term challenges are concerned. He says that the costs of high unemployment must be primary rather than the low risk of inflation. He says that the risk of fiscal contraction is more pressing than the risk from the long-run national debt. Diamond is hardly a doctrinaire liberal; he’s just allowing the facts to govern his policy insights at this time. That’s what Republicans in the Senate couldn’t abide.

President Obama announced that he would prefer FBI Director Robert Mueller to stay on for an additional two years beyond the 10-year term he has already served. Mueller, who became director of the FBI one week before 9-11, would see his term otherwise expire September 4.

Tom Udall has released the Senate rules reform package that he will introduce today for a vote, which he believes he can get passed with a simple majority. It includes most of the features that had been bandied about throughout the last couple weeks.

It’s the silent filibuster, the filibuster where the Majority Leader knows that it’ll take a week to get the head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission through the Senate, that is just a pure waste of time. And the rules of ending post-cloture time for nominations (because what’s to discuss or amend after that?), or ending the filibuster of the motion to proceed, would make those silent filibusters less painful.

Janet Yellen and Sarah Bloom Raskin finally got confirmed by the Senate as members of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. Peter Diamond, another nominee, will have to wait until the lame duck session. The confirmations were part of a large deal, where some nominees got to move through the Senate in exchange for Democrats holding pro forma sessions so President Obama could not make any recess appointments.

Chris Dodd, whose name sits at the head of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, doesn’t seem to know the intricacies of the law that bears his name. . . .

I think it’s important to recognize that “the White House” is not a monolith. There are sometimes counteracting forces there, and one aide may not know what the other aide is pushing. Increasingly the internecine fights get aired out in public, though typically anonymously. That’s the best way to read this denial of the plan I mentioned yesterday, to make Elizabeth Warren the interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

Treasury gets to set up the CFPB before it transitions into the Federal Reserve, and the interim director of the agency they name can get started right away without Senate confirmation. And he or she can hold the office indefinitely, or until the President gets a nominee confirmed for the post.

I don’t expect Warren to just become a permanent interim director. But with her in place and making the rules for the various industries to follow, she would have less of a problem with confirmation if nominated.