Whenever Democrats work themselves into a lather, a question is always worth asking:
What are they trying to hide?
Case in point, Elizabeth Warren’s frantic rants over President Trump’s appointment of Mick Mulvaney (Director of the Office of Management and Budget) as Acting Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has a nice sounding name that hides a darker agenda.
Much like the DOJ Slush Fund, the CFPB was founded for the purpose of extracting settlements from financial institutions and then directing the proceeds from those settlements to liberal causes.
The CFPB was established following passage of the disastrous Dodd-Frank Act (see: Dodd-Frank Must Go) and has some…unique…organizational structures.
The CFPB is funded by the Federal Reserve instead of the normal Congressional budgeting process. This means Congress lacks the ability to defund the Agency – a normalized means of Congressional control and/or oversight. The CFPB’s Director can only be fired “For Cause” by the President. The Directorship is essentially a tenured position at one of the most powerful agencies in Washington.
This structure allowed the CFPB to operate outside of any Congressional or Executive branch oversight and control.
The CFPB Director has the power to regulate pensions, retirement investment, mortgages, bank loans, credit cards and virtually every aspect of all consumer financial transactions. It’s reach is essentially boundless.
With no supervision or accountability.
The CFPB is the brain-child of that most famous of Native Americans – Elizabeth Warren. Ms. Warren had hoped to obtain the position of Director of the CFPB herself, but ultimately passed after it became clear she would never pass confirmation in the Senate.
The structure of the CFPB was so out of bounds, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, recently ruled its structure unconstitutional. You can find the ruling here. From the Court of Appeals’ ruling:
Because the CFPB is an independent agency headed by a single Director and not by a multi-member commission, the Director of the CFPB possesses more unilateral authority – that is, authority to take action on one’s own, subject to no check – than any single commissioner or board member in any other independent agency in the U.S. Government.
Indeed, as we will explain, the Director enjoys more unilateral authority than any other officer in any of the three branches of the U.S. Government, other than the President.
At the same time, the Director of the CFPB possesses enormous power over American business, American consumers, and the overall U.S. economy. The Director unilaterally enforces 19 federal consumer protection statutes, covering everything from home finance to student loans to credit cards to banking practices. The Director alone decides what rules to issue; how to enforce, when to enforce, and against whom to enforce the law; and what sanctions and penalties to impose on violators of the law.
The CFPB’s concentration of enormous executive power in a single, unaccountable, unchecked Director not only departs from settled historical practice, but also poses a far greater risk of arbitrary decision-making and abuse of power, and a far greater threat to individual liberty.
It was a damning opinion by the Court.
As a direct result of this ruling, Obama’s Director of the CFPB, Richard Cordray, announced his resignation – deciding to run for Governor of Ohio after finding his previously unlimited power at CFPB sharply curtailed.
Enter OMB’s Mick Mulvaney whom President Trump named as Acting Director following Cordray’s resignation.
Democrats lost their minds. Especially, Elizabeth Warren, who went on a twitter rampage:
.@realDonaldTrump can nominate the next @CFPB Director – but until that nominee is confirmed by the Senate, Leandra English is the Acting Director under the Dodd-Frank Act.
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) November 25, 2017
The only thing that will turn the @CFPB into a disaster is for @realDonaldTrump to ignore Dodd-Frank & name an acting director determined to destroy the agency.
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) November 25, 2017
Warren claimed President Trump lacked the authority to appoint Mulvaney as the Interim Director – while citing legal support for outgoing Director Cordray’s nomination of Leandra English as the interim director of the CFPB.
Unfortunately for Democrats, Warren appears to be dead wrong.
Mary McLeod, General Counsel of the CFPB, wrote a legal memo detailing her opinion that President Trump has full authority to appoint Mulvaney as Acting Director of the CFPB:
As General Counsel for the Bureau, it is my legal opinion that the President possesses the authority to designate an Acting Director for the Bureau under the FVRA.
The Department of Justice and the White House Office of Legal Counsel agree with Ms. McLeod’s assessment.
A Federal judge has set a hearing for the matter today at 4:00 pm. It is all but certain that President Trump will prevail.
Now, ask yourself this question:
Why would Democrats be fighting this hard over a Directorship they almost certainly have no authority over?
Answer: Mulvaney will now have full access to the CFPB’s financial books.
Are you getting concerned that @MickMulvaneyOMB is going to get a good close look at CFPB’s books?
— Jeff Carlson, CFA (@themarketswork) November 28, 2017
And that has Democrats deeply concerned.
As noted by The Conservative Treehouse:
Mick Mulvaney is now in a position to look at the books, look at the prior records within the bureau, and expose the political agenda within it to the larger public.
Most likely President Trump will not appoint a replacement until Mulvaney has exposed the corruption within the bureau. That sunlight is toxic to Elizabeth Warren and can potentially be politically destructive to the Democrats. If the secrets within the bureau are revealed, there’s a much greater likelihood the bureau will be dissolved.
There are billions of scheme and graft at stake. Within the record-keeping there are more than likely dozens of progressive/Democrat organizations being financed by the secret enterprise that operates without oversight.
During his short tenure as head of the OMB, Mulvaney has been responsible for killing more than 900 needless and costly regulations imposed by the Obama Administration. Mulvaney has been long-critical of both Dodd-Frank and the CFPB.
He is the perfect man for this job.
As Andrew McCarthy notes in, Trump’s in the Right in CFPB Tiff:
The CFPB is an unconstitutional monstrosity that ought to be abolished. Indeed, the current tiff is but a symptom of the underlying disease.
Budget director Mick Mulvaney was confirmed by the Senate in February. He is a conservative opponent of stifling government regulation. This, along with his similarly dim view of government debt, is why Democrats closed ranks in opposition to his appointment as budget director.
It also explains why the thought of Mulvaney at the helm of their beloved CFPB horrifies the media-Democrat complex.
McCarthy nails it.
The CFPB is “an unconstitutional monstrosity that ought to be abolished”.
Pocahontas is right to be concerned…
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