WhatFinger


Trump should have fired him months ago, but what he can do now is dismantle the awful CFPB

Obama's favorite abuser of deep state power quits agency Elizabeth Warren created



Obama's favorite abuser of deep state power quits agency Elizabeth Warren created You've been hearing from the media all day that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a heroic "watchdog," and that the resignation of director Richard Cordray is a tragic loss to consumers everywhere. Bolshevik. Cordray is a friend of trial lawyers, not consumers, and his specialty since Barack Obama put him in the job has been to shake down corporations and push disputes into class-action suits that enrich the lawyers and stick consumers with a few bucks or maybe a coupon or two.
Cordray resigned today, which is a shame only in the sense that he never should have been allowed to determine the timing of his own departure. President Trump should have fired him the day he took office. What Trump did do, back in February, was take steps to rein in the CFPB, but that didn't stop Cordray from running roughshod over both the business community and the consumers he was supposed to be sticking up for. In recent months, Cordray went so far as to prevent business/consumer disputes from going to arbitration, where it's much easier to get a settlement that's amenable to all parties. Why? Because trial lawyers love those class action suits, and making sure that as many of them as possible happen has been Cordray's specialty. Now Cordray is leaving, perhaps in the seemingly impossible quest to become an even worse Ohio governor than John Kasich. And his agency, which was created by Elizabeth Warren and has to accept almost no accountability of any kind, may finally be dismantled:
Under Mr. Cordray, the CFPB brought significant changes to consumer finance, a corner of the financial industry that had previously escaped regulatory scrutiny. The agency tightened underwriting standards for mortgages, required more disclosure on credit-card rates and fees, and introduced federal government oversight to payday lending. The agency’s aggressive enforcement actions sometimes went well beyond what were considered conventional practices. Those actions have drawn praise from consumer advocates and Democrats, but put Mr. Cordray and his agency in bitter disagreements with financial companies and Republican lawmakers.

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A pending case in a federal appeals court questions the constitutionality of the agency’s independent structure that prevents the president from firing its director without cause. Some Republican lawmakers had called on Mr. Trump to fire Mr. Cordray. The president took no action to do so. The Trump administration has unveiled its vision for the CFPB. In a June report laying out ideas for deregulation for the broad banking sector, the Treasury Department listed a dozen changes at the agency, including eliminating its authority to examine financial firms on a continuing basis and not be able to set its own budget. In the first substantial step to reverse agency policy, Mr. Trump signed a bill passed by Congress in October to overturn its rule that made it easier for consumers to sue banks in groups. The so-called arbitration rule was considered one of the most significant achievements of the CFPB’s rulemaking efforts and had been in several years in the making. The CFPB was established after the crisis as one of the most significant features of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-overhaul law, with an aim to tip the balance of power toward consumers away from the financial industry. The agency, a brainchild of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass), a fierce critic of Wall Street, has been a subject of attack of Republicans.

Maybe Trump figured it would be easier to just wait Cordray out and then get a clean shot at appointing his replacement. But even if he manages to get a more business-friendly director confirmed, you've still got to deal with the fact that the CFPB operates almost completely independent from any accountability or oversight. The Constitution vests executive power in only one person, and that's the president of the United States. Everyone else in the executive branch works for him. When Congress tells the president he can't fire a person within his own branch, that's a circumvention of the separation of powers. It's true that the president - Obama at the time - signed the legislation. But contrary to what you might think, the president does not have the constitutional authority to surrender his constitutional authority, and he certainly doesn't have the authority to surrender it on behalf of future presidents. And do not for one second believe the media spin about what a hero Cordray supposedly was to consumers. Cordray may have been a hero to self-proclaimed consumer advocacy groups tied to trial lawyers, but he did nothing for everyday people, and most of that money he's said to have gotten back for consumers actually went to the lawyers. One of the primary missions of the Obama Administration was to harass the business community and shake it down for cash whenever possible. And if doing so could line the pockets of trial lawyers in the process, that was killing two birds with one stone. Everything Cordray did as head of CFPB was in service of that agenda. The best thing Trump could do with CFPB is to dismantle it entirely. There are already consumer protection laws on the books and we don't need an out-of-control, unaccountable bureaucrat running roughshod over business in the name of consumer protection. But if Trump is not going to do that, he should at least realign CFPB's mission so it's focused on the actual needs of real consumers, and not on enriching trial lawyers at the expense of the businesses that also happen to serve as the employers of many consumers.


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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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