Kathleen Casey Nominated to SEC

Kathleen Casey, staff director of the Senate Banking Committee, was nominated by President Bush on Thursday to succeed fellow Republican Cynthia A. Glassman on the Securities and Exchange Commission, the White House said.

Casey, 40, is a top aide to Banking Committee Chairman Richard C. Shelby, an Alabama Republican. Glassman announced May 15 that she would depart the five-member commission after her term ends June 5.

Casey, who calls herself a conservative, would join an agency that is trying to break from the partisan disputes that divided it under former chairmen William H. Donaldson and Harvey L. Pitt. Christopher Cox, a Bush appointee who succeeded Donaldson in August, has focused on building consensus.

Casey’s view is that “the market is the best regulator,” said Wayne A. Abernathy, executive director of the American Bankers Assn. in Washington and a former U.S. Treasury official. “That doesn’t mean she’s opposed to any regulation, but when in doubt, her view is, ‘Let’s see what the market can do first.’ ”

Abernathy used to hold the same banking committee job as Casey under former Sen. Phil Gramm, a Texas Republican.

The nominee has spent her entire legal career working for Shelby, one of the lawmakers with the most sway over the securities and financial services industries. The congressional background contrasts with that of Glassman, 59, an economist who spent 12 years at the Federal Reserve and five years at accounting firm Ernst & Young before joining the SEC.

Casey is the committee’s “No. 1 policy person,” said Richard Roberts, a former Democratic SEC commissioner and Shelby staffer. “She is smart, hardworking, experienced.”

Casey’s background with Shelby and the banking committee may boost her chances for confirmation; that committee holds hearings on SEC nominations.

Maryland Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said in a statement that Casey “will make a very able commissioner at the SEC, and I support her nomination.”

Casey formerly worked as Shelby’s chief of staff and legislative director. She is a graduate of Pennsylvania State University and George Mason University Law School. The daughter of an Air Force colonel, she was born on a U.S. military base in Tripoli, Libya.