What’s worse, she’s been doing a pretty good job of it so far. When she was first appointed to set up the agency, I heard rumbling that she had no management chops and would make a hash of things. This prediction has turned out to be spectacularly wrong. She has attracted first-rate talent for virtually all the top jobs. The new bureau’s first move was to persuade two government agencies to combine mortgage forms into one easy-to-read document — no easy task given how government works. She has consistently talked about making bank disclosures easier for consumers to understand.

Image Joe Nocera Credit... Earl Wilson/The New York Times

You would think that Republicans would like this sort of thing. Instead, they portray Warren as a polarizing ideologue bent on creating an agency that, as Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, put it recently, “could be a serious threat to our financial system.” How, precisely, an agency that tries to keep financial consumers from being gouged threatens the system is something no one ever explains. (Unless, of course, gouging consumers is central to bank profitability. Hmmm...)

On the Senate side, the approach of the Republicans has been to claim that their real issue is not with Warren but with the structure of the new bureau. Some 44 Republican senators recently sent a letter to President Obama saying that they would not approve any director without major changes. In particular, they want to deprive the agency of automatic financing, so that, unlike other bank regulators, it would have to go through an annual appropriations process. Which, of course, would then allow the Republicans to starve it via budgetary deprivation.

Unfortunately, the president’s response has been to dither. Despite the impending start date for the bureau — and despite the fact that Warren is the clear and obvious choice to run it — he still hasn’t been able to pull the trigger. For months, there were rumblings that he would name Warren in a “recess appointment,” which wouldn’t require Senate confirmation. But that is simply not going to happen: There are parliamentary maneuvers that will allow the Senate to remain “in session” even when there are no actual senators in the vicinity.