By Darius Dixon | POLITICO
President Barack Obama’s nominee to lead FERC announced Tuesday that he had pulled his name from consideration in the face of mounting opposition from coal supporters and a stalemate in a crucial Senate committee.
The fall of the former Colorado utility regulator Ron Binz is a stunning setback for the president, who has succeeded in winning Senate confirmations for far more controversial nominees at EPA, the Pentagon and the Labor Department.
Perhaps just as striking was the political fervor brought to bear against a nominee to lead a regulator that is little known outside of Washington, and one that typically restricts its work to the highly technical rules for the nation’s energy backbone of power lines and pipelines.
