Mick Mulvaney, creature of the swamp
Seldom do ex-members of Congress publicly admit to the legalized pay-toplay schemes that too often go on between lawmakers and lobbyists.
But Mick Mulvaney, now a top Trump administration official, practically bragged about them this week at an American Bankers Association conference. “If you were a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you,” he said of his days as a South Carolina congressman. “If you were a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”
This says a lot about how Mulvaney did business in Congress, where the commercial banking industry gave his campaigns about $203,000 and payday lenders ponied up nearly $63,000. And it says a lot about what consumers — who don’t have political action committees to lavish money on lawmakers — can expect from Mulvaney, now leading the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in addition to his day job as White House budget director.
Ever since he took over the CFPB last fall, Mulvaney has been trying to cripple the agency, which has recovered nearly $12 billion for consumers over the past seven years. In a showdown this month in Congress over the agency’s future, it quickly became obvious who was wearing the black hat. Mulvaney would take the country back to the bad old days when banks and other financial outlaws scammed consumers, who were outgunned and out of luck.
Under questioning from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who helped create the consumer bureau, Mulvaney was left to admit that he had co-sponsored a measure to kill the agency and voted for budgets to eliminate it.
Now he’s trying to do from the inside what he couldn’t do as a lawmaker, taking the bureau apart piece by piece.
Mulvaney has weakened a rule — opposed by payday lenders — that would have made them determine that borrowers can repay them before granting a high-interest short-term loan. (Most legitimate businesses want to know whether people can pay back a loan.) He has dropped lawsuits against online payday lenders accused of charging customers up to 950% interest. He has not brought a single new enforcement action. And he has called on Congress to weaken the agency he heads.
On Tuesday, Mulvaney told the bankers that he plans to end the public’s ability to see a database of consumer complaints. The fact that the database is public has pressured lenders and other targets of complaints to quickly fix problems. Pushing it underground will take away leverage, much to the delight of scammers who can keep their misdeeds secret.
Mulvaney’s performance before the bankers, on top of his performance as bureau director, spurred a Twitter storm from critics: “Mr. Mulvaney — you’ve made it clear that your congressional office was for sale,” Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, tweeted. “Does the @CFPB have a price tag, too?”
The answer to that already seems obvious.