Before the vote, more than 200 organizations, led by Americans for Financial Reform, sent a letter to senators warning that the CFPB’s ability to regulate and protect consumers would be severely restricted without a director.

With this morning’s vote on General Cordray’s nomination to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Senators faced a choice. Would they stand up for fair rules of the road in the consumer financial marketplace, or would they side with the big Wall Street banks, and the bottom feeders in the lending industry?

Unfortunately, 45 Senators chose the latter. With unemployment still above 8.5%, and millions of foreclosures devastating families and communities, they chose to defend the status quo that allowed the deceptive and abusive lending at the heart of the financial crisis to flourish. With people struggling to make ends meet in hard times, they chose to protect payday lenders making 300% ‘debt trap’ loans. Now they are on the record. We do not think their constituents will be pleased.

The Consumer Federation of America, Americans for Financial Reform, and the AFL-CIO, hosted a conference call with reporters and bloggers on Tuesday, December 6th to discuss threats to a key Dodd-Frank provision designed to protect municipalities, pensions and other vulnerable swaps market participants from predatory industry practices of the kind that just last month drove Jefferson County, Alabama to declare the nation’s largest ever municipal bankruptcy.