We need Elizabeth Warren. David Weidner makes the case in the Wall Street Journal:

There really is no other choice. Ms. Warren, a Harvard Law School Professor who has been chairing the House Oversight Committee minding TARP's progress has been the CPFA's biggest proponent since she floated the idea in 2007. Giving the job to someone else would be like letting Steve Jobs come up with the iPad and then giving it to Microsoft Corp. to market. You'd almost certainly lose the soul.

Ms. Warren has spent the last few years of her career preparing for this moment. She's written about the devastating effects of bankruptcy on U.S. households and has given countless interviews. Consumer protection as a part of financial reform has been her single biggest legacy in Washington, save perhaps for her testy public exchanges about TARP with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

Wouldn't you know it, that sometimes confrontational relationship has led to speculation that Mr. Geithner was lobbying against Ms. Warren behind the scenes. It's a charge the Treasury Department denies, but not out of the realm of possibility, given Mr. Geithner's public scrapes with her about TARP and his likely support of Michael S. Barr, assistant Treasury Secretary, who is reportedly on the short list.

Even with Mr. Geithner's support or his ambivalence, Ms. Warren seems to have worn out her Washington welcome. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sen. Chris Dodd (D.,-Conn.) on Monday openly wondered whether Ms. Warren would get enough votes for confirmation should she be nominated. "The question is, 'Is she confirmable?'" Sen. Dodd told NPR's Diane Rehm show. "And there's a serious question about it."

Edward Yingling, chief executive of the American Bankers Association, said there's "tremendous concern" in the industry over Ms. Warren's possible nomination. State banking groups in Virginia and Nebraska have vocally opposed her nomination. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent millions on an ad campaign against the protection agency.

Good. We don't need an financial industry shill regulating the financial industry. We need a real independent watchdog. There's no better choice than Elizabeth Warren.

This is encouraging:

Wall Street's lobbying army is marching around Washington in a push to shape the final financial-overhaul bill. But it has gotten harder to get through the door with some lawmakers.

One bank has complained that it no longer has access to House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D., Mass.), whose schedule has filled up to accommodate negotiations with his Senate counterparts during the next two weeks.

This is a step in the right direction. Lobbyists need to be locked out as early in the process as possible. Our legislators should be working for us, not the lobbyists.

In today's must-read in the Wall Street Journal, Elizabeth Warren makes the case for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA).

The consumer agency is a watchdog that would root out gimmicks and traps and slim down paperwork, giving families a fighting chance to hang on to some of their money. So far, Wall Street CEOs seem determined to stop any kind of watchdog. They seem to think that they can run their businesses forever without our trust. This is a bad calculation.

It's a bad calculation because shareholders suffer enormously from the long-term cost of the boom-and- bust cycles that accompany a poorly regulated market. J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon recently explained this brave new world, saying that crises should be expected "every five to seven years."

He is wrong. New laws that came out of the Great Depression ended 150 years of boom-and-bust cycles and gave us 50 years with virtually no financial meltdowns. The stability ended as we dismantled those laws and failed to replace them with new laws that reflected modern business practices.

Even though boom and bust causes suffering on Main Street and is of questionable value for Wall Street - the banksters are fighting hard for it.

Now, a year later, President Obama's proposals for reform are bottled up in the Senate. The same Wall Street CEOs who brought the economy to its knees have spent more than a year and hundreds of millions of dollars furiously lobbying Washington to kill the president's proposal for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA).

The latest bankster-funded lie is that the CFPA is more "big government." Warren lays waste to that argument:

The latest lie is that the CFPA is "big government." The CEOs all know that the current regulatory structure, which they support, is big government at its worst: bureaucratic, unaccountable and ineffective. The CFPA will consolidate seven separate bureaucracies, cut down on paperwork, and promote understandable consumer products. In the process, it will stabilize the industry, rebuild confidence in the securitization market, and leave more money in the pockets of families. Complaining about short, readable contracts and efforts to slim down bureaucracy only further diminishes the banks' credibility.

This generation of Wall Street CEOs could be the ones to forfeit America's trust. When the history of the Great Recession is written, they can be singled out as the bonus babies who were so short-sighted that they put the economy at risk and contributed to the destruction of their own companies. Or they can acknowledge how Americans' trust has been lost and take the first steps to earn it back.

Wall Street is using their money and influence to take advantage of a broken Senate to obstruct reform that's good for Main Street. Our economy needs the CFPA and we must fight for this common sense solution that will make government smaller, more efficient and better able to protect consumers.