The motion to end debate on gold-standard whack job Judy Shelton failing today.

Charles Grassley is out, having tested positive for Covid-19, and Rick “Bat-Boy” Scott was quarantining after having been exposed to someone who tested positive, so there were not enough votes to approve her:

Judy Shelton’s nomination to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors was blocked in the Senate on Tuesday, with bipartisan opposition to the controversial economist and GOP absences prompted by the coronavirus imperiling her candidacy.

The vote had been expected to be razor-thin for Shelton, who was nominated by President Trump despite her past criticism of the central bank and her unorthodox views of monetary policy. But after the vote was scheduled, two Republicans, Sens. Rick Scott (Fla.) and Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), announced they were quarantining themselves after being exposed to the coronavirus and could not attend. (Grassley on Tuesday evening announced he had tested positive for the virus.) Two Republican senators voted against advancing Shelton on Tuesday; a third GOP senator who does not support her, Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), was not in attendance for the vote Tuesday.

The last-minute shifts proved too much for Republicans to overcome, at least for now. Although the GOP holds 53 seats in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was able to muster only 48 Republican senators to end the filibuster on Shelton’s nomination. In the end, he voted against moving the nomination forward as well, a procedural move that allows him to bring up Shelton’s nomination at a later time.

………

Apart from Lael Brainard, Trump has put every other Fed governor in his or her current post. But the seven-seat board has been operating with two vacancies for a few years, and Trump has struggled to get his final nominees through. In 2019, two of Trump’s picks, Stephen Moore and Herman Cain, withdrew their bids after intense scrutiny for their past remarks and views about women jeopardized their chances at confirmation.

Oh, right.  Nominating someone whose qualifications for the position was that he ran a pizza chain.  I remember that now.

Shelton’s nomination was particularly controversial given her calls for a return to the gold standard, which the nation fully abandoned in 1971. She advised Trump’s 2016 presidential run and has been outspoken against the Fed as an institution. She also was criticized for altering some of her views to appear in closer agreement with Trump’s aggressive push for lower interest rates, which some senators worried would insert politics into Fed decisions.

………

Underscoring how critical every Republican vote will be in the waning weeks of this year, McConnell urged senators during a private party lunch Tuesday to be careful and healthy so the GOP-controlled majority can finish work that remains to be done, such as confirming nominees to the circuit courts, according to three people directly familiar with his closed-door remarks.

Am I a bad person for hoping that the chef at this party was brewing a case of Coronavirus, and coughed all over the food?

In perhaps an indication of the Republicans’ middling enthusiasm for Shelton, no GOP senators spoke on the Senate floor in favor of her nomination on Monday or as of Tuesday afternoon. McConnell praised the slate of judicial nominees that the Senate was on track to confirm, but said nothing about Shelton directly.

His counterpart, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), was not as tight-lipped.

“Judy Shelton is not only unqualified for the job; she is a threat to our economic recovery and doesn’t belong on the Fed,” Schumer said Tuesday. “And thanks to the bipartisan coalition that opposed her nomination today, she isn’t any closer to being there.”

The election is over, Trump has the attention span of a gnat on a meth binge, and the business elites are not impressed by Shelton.

It’s no surprise that the Republicans are not going to the wall for this one.