The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has sprung into action pretty decently since Richard Cordray was installed as director. CFPB has presented new, simple-to-read mortgage forms, and submitted a plan to regulate debt collection agencies and credit reporting bureaus. Today Cordray is in New York to discuss overdraft fees, a particularly egregious money-making scheme for banks and he’s inviting consumer feedback.

Miller’s core strengths were always consumer protection and financial regulation, not quite in the window of the major priorities for a Governor. Attorney General would be a great fit, but Democrat Roy Cooper (who’s on the foreclosure fraud settlement executive committee) will run for re-election.

The CFPB has worked to bring clarity to mortgage, student loan and credit card statements with their “Know Before You Owe” program. But with the appointment of Cordray, now they get the full regulatory authorities of the agency.

The President is making a distinction between nominees who the various agencies can do without for a spell and nominees whose seating is crucial to the functioning of the agency.

President Obama missed his chance yesterday to use the “Roosevelt precedent” to appoint Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or make any recess appointment. But the Wall Street Journal reported that the President got legal clearance to basically ignore the pro forma sessions being held by Congress, enabling a recess appointment at any point in this holiday break.

During the recess, the President has a number of opportunities to make recess appointments. He could simply determine that the pro forma sessions being used to keep Congress active were insufficient to prevent recess appointments. He could use his Constitutional power to adjourn Congress. Or he could follow the Teddy Roosevelt precedent. But it appears he won’t.

Describing the blockade of Richard Cordray to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as a form of nullification sounds accurate to me. Cordray is almost an afterthought, as Republicans disagree with the concept of a federal agency that looks out for consumers. So they plan to stop confirmation of any director, which in this case holds off consumer protection regulation of non-bank financial institutions, unless it is gutted.

Today, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unveiled a prototype credit card agreement designed to ease understanding of obligations. The CFPB will test the statement with the Pentagon Federal Credit Union, one of the largest in the nation. This comes just before a Senate vote on Richard Cordray’s nomination to head the CFPB.

The Obama Administration is making a futile push this week to confirm Richard Cordray as the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, even though 44 Republican Senators have asserted they will not confirm anyone to that position unless the agency gets a radical transformation to reduce its effectiveness.

We’re going to see a vote in the next two or three weeks on the confirmation of Richard Cordray for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and that’s paradoxically a pretty bad sign for his confirmation. Indeed, this feels exactly like the unsuccessful confirmations of Dawn Johnsen or Goodwin Liu: a snap confirmation vote that fails, followed by a quick withdrawal of the nominee. That the White House is pushing for this vote is another indicator of this dynamic.