Another Historic Milestone For Black Women As Senate Confirms Lisa Cook To Fed’s Board of Governors

After several months of Republican opposition, the Senate voted Tuesday to confirm economist Lisa Cook to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, making her the first Black woman to serve on the board. Democrats assembled all 50 of its colleagues to pull off a razor-thin victory with Vice-President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote, saying the Vice-President “votes in the affirmative.”

The proceedings were another partisan battle. Before the vote, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “The American people deserve an independent, non-partisan inflation fighter for this important post.”

The Biden Administration submitted Cook’s name for consideration on January 14, 2022. Cook, who served as a Senior Economist on former President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, has been a visiting professor at Harvard and is a tenured professor at Michigan State University. The Georgia native helped integrate schools when she was a child and still has physical scars sustained during an attack by her young schoolmates. She attended Spelman College in Atlanta, St. Hilda’s College in Oxford, and graduated with her doctorate in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

The Senate Banking Committee first held hearings on Cook’s nomination in February. One month later, the Senate deadlocked along party lines which forced the entire Senate to move to discharge her nomination out of the committee. On March 29 the U.S. Senate discharged Cook’s nomination from the Senate Banking Committee by a 50-49 vote. Two weeks later, the Senate failed to advance her nomination by a vote of 47-51. Two Democratic Senators were absent due to COVID-19.

At that time, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, a Cook supporter, said, “It is disappointing that Senate Republicans are exploiting the absences of our colleagues to stop a qualified Black woman – the first African American woman ever nominated to serve on the Federal Reserve Board. Once again, they’ve decided that scoring political points is more important than serving the public and bringing down prices for American families.”

The Final Debate

Republicans had refused to vote for Cook, portraying her as “unqualified” and a left-wing extremist. Senator Pat Toomey said, “It’s exceptionally important to keep politics out of monetary policy.”

Ohio’s Democratic Senator Brown explained why he championed Cook for the Fed board and challenged the Republicans’ characterization of her as unqualified. Brown described Cook as “different” from other nominees.

“They almost all believe in this trickle-down economics,” Brown said. “Lisa Cook is different. She doesn’t come from the coasts. She comes from what most people on the coasts would call flyover country … But they don’t know real people. Lisa Cook knows real people.”

Cook’s work includes research illuminating the economic costs of racism and sexism. According to the Washington Post, Cook “has analyzed how patent records show that the riots, lynchings and Jim Crow laws that targeted African American communities in the late 180ss and early 1900s hurt Black people’s ability to pursue inventions and discoveries.”

In a fashion similar to recently confirmed Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Cook faced fierce opposition from Senate Republicans. Jackson, however, appeared to benefit from a publicized well-orchestrated campaign uniting a coalition of Black women’s organizations along with legal professors and attorneys to mobilize public opinion in her favor. Supreme Court confirmations have also become highly visible and contentious political proceedings in recent years due to the controversial cases justices consider.

Amid Cook’s confirmation, the Federal Reserve is enacting policies to combat the highest rate of inflation in 40 years without jeopardizing the job market.

President Biden has also nominated economist Philip Jefferson, vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty at Davidson College, to the Board of Governors. If Jefferson is confirmed, it will be the fourth time a Black man has served on the board and would mark the first time the Fed board has included more than one Black governor.