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.

Eric Schneiderman’s has gone where federal regulators fear to tread, to actually do the jobs of the federal government should do. In foreclosure fraud, he undertook the investigation that the feds would not. Now he is applying that to foreclosures on active-duty military service members.

If you wanted an indication that Scott Brown was in any way nervous about his impending re-election matchup against Elizabeth Warren next year, he has now officially endorsed Richard Cordray to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency that was the brainchild of his future opponent.

The LA Times’ is running an excellent series on subprime auto loans. The first installment concerned “Buy Here Pay Here” used car dealerships, and how they hook low-income borrowers into high-interest loans, then repossess the car when the loans go bad and resell the car to the next mark. It echoes the housing mortgage scams, complete with securitization schemes.

Pending home sales fell again in September, yet another of the bad signals coming out of a broken housing market, one of the biggest challenges for economic growth. Residential investment as a share of GDP is now shockingly low, below any point in the past 60 years.

There are two programs here. The first is income-based repayment. Under current law, graduates with student loans can opt to pay 15% of their income for 25 years instead of a monthly student loan repayment based on the cost of the loan. In the reconciliation sidecar to the Affordable Care Act, actually, this was reduced to 10% of income, starting in 2014. The plan announced under executive authority moves that date up to 2012, and changes the debt forgiveness end date to 20 years from 25. This would only benefit those who graduate college between 2012 and 2014; people who have already graduated or who are in repayment won’t benefit from this change. The Administration claims that 1.6 million graduates would be eligible for the new program.