Fight at the CFPB corral
Who knows who’ll prevail in the immediate showdown over control of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but here’s a fair bet: Over the long run, there will be no winners, just a setback for an agency duty-bound to fight like hell for the little guy against wolves eager to fleece them.
Either Leandra English, the pick of just-departed bureau director Richard Cordray, will prevail in her federal lawsuit claiming that the DoddFrank Act that created the CFPB gives Cordray authority to name his fill-in until President Trump names and the Senate okays a successor.
Or Mick Mulvaney, White House budget director, gets to step right in as the President’s temporary appointee, under a broader law applying to vacancies — meaning that a President who deems the CFPB “a complete disaster” installs a director who as a congressman voted to abolish the bureau.
Talk about an awkward Monday at the office: Both directors reported for duty at the agency’s D.C. headquarters, Mulvaney with a box of Idon’t-bite doughnuts in hand.
They awaited an initial ruling from a federal judge — one that will by no means be decisive in what is likely to be a drawn out legal battle.
In the balance is the fate of a proven advocate for American consumers — which Mulvaney has called “a joke in a sick, sad kind of way” — that has held to account big banks and small-time hustlers alike when they violate federal law.
The litany of Cordray’s accomplishments can’t be repeated often enough:
Fining Wells Fargo $100 million after it illegally opened millions of accounts in customers’ names without their knowledge.
Advancing a breakthrough ban on mandatory arbitration in credit contracts that undermine the constitutional right of borrowers to bring their grievances to court in class-action lawsuits. (Congress wrecked that rule earlier this month.)
Finalizing a regulation requiring high-interest payday lenders to make sure that customers can actually afford to pay back what they owe.
Working to get 9/11 recovery workers settlement funds from slick-talking ripoff artists.
Under Trump — who falsely claims that because of the CFPB, financial institutions (which are enjoying record profits) “have been devastated” — the bureau is certain sooner or later to have its incisors removed.
No one said it better than Sen. Elizabeth Warren, back when she was a Harvard Law professor selling Congress on the idea of the bureau: “My second choice is no agency at all and plenty of blood and teeth left on the floor.”
Get the mops ready.