Many in the Cleveland Tea Party became aware of the mis-named Consumer Financial Protection Bureau when Ohio’s Richard Cordray was appointed as the
Bureau’s first Director in 2012. I was hoping that President Trump would find a
way to eliminate this agency, since it is not accountable to Congress or the
Executive branch. This agency is now back in the news, since Elizabeth Warren has a
chance at becoming the Democrat Party’s nominee for President. Lloyd
Billingsley at Front Page Magazine has an update:
As announced this month, the U.S.
Supreme Court will hear Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau. The case involves constitutional issues such as the separation of
powers, but there’s a lot more going with this agency. As Judicial
Fortitude author Peter
J. Wallison notes, the CFPB is “the brainchild of Sen. Elizabeth Warren,”
and that makes a case for closer examination.
Her claims to Cherokee ancestry
have been exposed as a fraud, yet Warren remains a leading contender for the
Democrat nomination for president. In her 2014 A
Fighting Chance, Warren maintained the fake Cherokee claims and also billed
herself as an economic expert.
Nobody in this country “got rich on
his own,” she explains. Rather, “you moved goods on the roads the rest of us
paid for” and used workers “the rest of us paid to educate.” You were safe in
your factory “because of police and fire forces the rest of us paid for.” And
so on, the same Big Brother view as POTUS 44. If people are in financial
distress, Warren blames their problems on the banking industry, portrayed as
the flywheel of capitalist greed and trickery. That view comes across in the
structure of the CFPB.
As Wallison notes, the CFPB was
given plenary authority to enforce all federal laws that apply to financial
transactions with consumers, and more. CFPB power was “broadened beyond
existing laws” to take enforcement action on any action it finds “unfair,
deceptive, or abusive.” Since “abusive” is not defined, this served up “a vast
field for the agency to define and pursue.” Wallison finds this a “dangerous
step in support of an even more powerful and uncontrolled administrative
state.”
For example, the CFPB director gets
a five-year term fully protected from removal by the president other than for
“inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance.” This places the director
outside the control of the president, “whose ability to pursue the policies he
was elected to implement depends crucially on the ability to remove and replace
the senior officials of executive agencies.” Trump nominee Brett Kavanaugh is
already on record that the CFPB director is the most powerful person in the
federal government, aside from the president. And it gets worse.
The CFPB gets funding not from
Congress but the Federal Reserve, and the money comes at the request of the
CFPB director. And under the enabling Dodd-Frank legislation, the Fed has “no
ability to affect the agency’s actions.” So Warren’s CFPB is beyond the control
of Congress, and if the Supreme Court upholds the status quo, “it would be
possible for Congress to create other agencies that are beyond the control of
any elected body.”
. . .
The full article is here. Scary stuff.
# # #
