The Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim reported Tuesday that Sen.-elect Elizabeth Warren, a dogged consumer advocate whose critique of Wall Street excess was a centerpiece of her campaign, will join the Senate Banking Committee. Wall Street spent boatloads of money to prevent Warren’s election, but now, as the Center for Responsive Politics noted, she will have oversight of the rules and regulations under which banks operate:

The securities and investments industry contributed just $245,000 to Warren and spent $3 million supporting her opponent Scott Brown, according to OpenSecrets data from mid-October. The industry was Brown’s top supporter.

The Financial/Insurance/Real Estate sector followed suit and contributed $6 million to Brown and a puny half-a-million to Warren. Businesses also favored Brown heavily, and his top contributors came straight from Wall Street. And though there wasn’t much outside spending in the race because of a pledge made by the two candidates, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose members include business and financial interests, spent $400,000 on the race in support of Brown and against Warren.

Several Senate candidates supported by Wall Street wound up losing. As a member of the Banking Committee, Warren will have the opportunity to stand against both the watering down of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law and new misguided efforts to reduce limits on Wall Street.

Ohio Senator Rob Portman (R) was one of a handful of Washington, D.C lawmakers and policy experts invited to participate in a panel discussion on the fiscal cliff on Tuesday morning, but his prepared remarks were temporarily derailed by about a dozen protestors who stood up, one at a time, to confront Portman over his support for the Republican plan to cut billions from social programs and entitlements that millions of low-income and middle class Americans rely on.

For five minutes, individuals scattered throughout the audience interrupted Portman to ask him not to cut programs like Medicare and Social Security or spending on teachers and other public employees. Several of them identified themselves as his constituents, to which Portman responded by promising them an audience following his remarks. The confrontations, though coordinated, harkened back to last spring, when Republicans returned home to their districts only to find themselves face to face with angry voters who voiced their displeasure at the Republicans’ budget plan of deep cuts and no increases in revenue.

Portman was invited to speak by a group calling itself “Fix The Debt,” a collection of corporate CEOs who are advocating cuts to entitlement programs while simultaneously pushing for more than $100 billion in tax breaks for themselves and their companies.

Watch the protests:

Things only got more tense once the protestors were escorted from the room. The cameraman captured Ed Haislmaier, a senior research fellow from the Heritage Foundation, shouting angrily at the crowd, and it appears that another individual tried to grab the camera before the footage cuts off.

Rep. John Boehner’s (R-OH) proposal to avert the so-called ‘fiscal cliff’ is far from moderate: He refuses to consider taxing millionaires, he wants to raise the payroll tax, and his plan to raise revenue is similar to the detail-free ideas of former presidential candidate Mitt Romney. On top of all that, the namesake of his plan — economics heavyweight Erskine Bowles — rejected the title, saying that the plan wasn’t centrist enough.

But that isn’t stopping some far-right organizations and members of Congress from rejecting the proposal. A few Republicans have come out against the Boehner plan, either as an attempt to try to make the Speaker look moderate when he’s not, or as a way of evincing a personal vendetta. Here are four Republicans calling Boehner’s plan a cave on the fiscal showdown:

Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS): The freshman Congressman from Kansas might be harboring some personal feelings against GOP leadership right now: Huelskamp was just taken off of the budget committee for having opposed leadership too many times. He’s speaking out against leadership Republicans, saying they “only give lip service to conservative principles.”

Americans for Prosperity Preisdent Tim Phillips: The point of an advocacy organization is to push their own agenda, and AFP has been vocal about theirs: To stop Democrats from raising any taxes, and to cut back on social safety net spending. Phillips trashed Boehner’s plan in an interview with National Journal, saying “Sadly, this plan leaves conservatives wanting.”

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC): As a tea party standard-bearer, DeMint may be trying to push Boehner as far to the right as possible by calling out his plan on Twitter. It’s also possible the Senator was feigning outrage, an easy way to paint Boehner as reasonable. “Speaker Boehner’s offer of an $800 billion tax hike will destroy jobs and allow politicians in Washington to spend even more,” he wrote.

The Heritage Foundation: According to National Journal, the advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation sent its members an email disparaging Boehner’s plan: “Not only are Republican leaders asking their members to go back on their promise not to raise taxes on the American people,” the email reads, “but they appear unwilling to fight for the bold entitlement reforms that won them the House in 2010.”

In fact, there’s no compromise in Boehner’s plan at all, just a vague promise to find a method of increasing revenue. It cuts deeply from social programs while sparing top earners from any additional taxes. Indeed, every potential olive branch extended by Republicans has been nothing more than a bait and switch, signaling to the public that Republicans are willing to play a fair game, but without any actual proposals to go along with the gesture.

Throughout the fiscal cliff negotiations Republicans have insisted on preserving tax cuts for the richest 2 percent of Americans, but have dogmatically opposed maintaing a payroll tax holiday that disproportionately benefits the middle class. Payroll taxes fall harder on those lower down the income ladder and economists believe that allowing 2011′s 2-percent decrease to expire could undermine economic growth, while permitting the top rates to go up would have only minimal impact.

On Tuesday morning, during an appearance on SiriusXM’s POTUS Politics, Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) argued that raising marginal rates on the very rich would slow-down job creation but insisted that the nation’s debt problem requires the government to allow the payroll tax holiday to expire. Price said that individuals — presumably those who benefit most from the holiday — must feel “more pain” to help set the country on a sound fiscal footing:

TIM FARLEY (HOST): The payroll tax holiday is likely going away. People will likely get that increase in the deduction from your pay as of January 15, you’ll see your first paycheck, 2 percent will be gone. And I wonder if, even if you come to a solution…people are going to look at their paychecks and say, ‘I thought we solved this and look at all this money being taken out of my paycheck.

PRICE: Well, remember, step back and recognize that we’ve had four straight years of trillion dollar plus deficits, we’re $16 trillion plus dollars in debt. This doesn’t get fixed without some pain for everybody…The remarkable challenge that we have requires more work and more diligence and more pain for more individuals.

Listen:

Recent nonpartisan studies have shown that the Bush tax cuts for the rich — those on income above $250,000 — don’t boost the economy, while providing relief to lower and middle class Americans could significantly speed up the recovery. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), for instance, “Extending both the current 2 percentage-point cut in the payroll tax and emergency unemployment benefits…would boost real GDP by about three-quarters of a percent by the end of 2013.”

But unfortunately, the GOP is more interested in ideologically-driven policies that shrink government — and make “very painful cuts” to benefits — than growing the economy.