SEC Nominees Fairfax, Peirce Move to Full Senate for Vote

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WASHINGTON – The Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs has recommended that the full Senate approve President Obama's two nominees for the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The committee's action on Hester Peirce, a senior research fellow and director of the financial markets working group at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and Lisa Fairfax, a professor of law at George Washington University, came in an en bloc voice vote in a room off the Senate floor on Thursday. Everyone on the committee voted as a group and a person-by-person vote was not recorded.

The nominees must now be approved by the full Senate.

Committee chair Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., has been under pressure from committee Democrats for delaying approval of about 20 administration nominees that were pending while he faced re-election. Obama first nominated Peirce and Fairfax on Oct. 21, but the two nominees were not given a hearing until March 15 this year.

At that hearing, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y, pressed the two SEC nominees to support mandated disclosure of corporate political spending, but neither took a firm position on the issue.

Schumer, along with Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Robert Menendez, D-N.J., said they would vote against Peirce and Fairfax during a follow-up session when the committee first tried to advance the nominees last month, citing concerns about their unclear positions on the disclosures. The dissention from Democrats caused Shelby to table the vote indefinitely.

Peirce is nominated to replace former Republican SEC Commissioner Daniel Gallagher, who left the commission on Oct. 2. Fairfax would replace former Democratic Commissioner Luis Aguilar, whose term expired last June.

Before her role with the Mercatus Center, Peirce served as senior counsel to the Republican staff of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs from 2008 to 2011 and was a staff attorney at the SEC from 2000 to 2008. Between 2004 and 2008 she was counsel to SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins. She received her undergraduate degree from Case Western Reserve University and her law degree from Yale Law School.

Fairfax serves on the executive board at George Washington's law school and is director of programs for the George Washington Center for Law, Economics and Finance. She has held various law professor positions since 2004 and was a member of the National Adjudicatory Council of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority from 2008 to 2011. Fairfax was a member of FINRA's NASDAQ market regulation committee from 2008 to 2012 and an associate with Ropes & Gray between 1995 and 2000. She received her undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard University.

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