Court fight brewing over consumer post
President Donald Trump’s appointment of his budget director as interim director of a consumer financial protection agency championed by Democrats was challenged in a lawsuit filed in federal court Sunday night.
Leandra English, the federal official elevated to the position of interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by its outgoing director, filed the lawsuit against Trump and his choice, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney.
The lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia asked for a declaratory judgment and a temporary restraining order to block Mulvaney from taking over the bureau.
English cited the Doddfrank Act, which created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She said that as deputy director, she became the acting director under the law and argued that the federal law the White House contends supports Trump’s appointment of Mulvaney doesn’t apply when another statute designates a successor.
English was chief of staff to bureau director Richard Cordray when he named her deputy director as he prepared to resign Friday. Cordray was appointed to the position by President Barack Obama and has been criticized by congressional Republicans as overzealous.
Mulvaney, a former congressman, has called the agency a “joke” and an example of bureaucracy run amok. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer accused Trump of ignoring the law “in order to put a fox in charge of a hen house.”
With Mulvaney there “for the foreseeable future,” Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., said on “Fox News Sunday,” he hopes to see “reforms to that agency, which has essentially very little accountability to the Congress or anybody else.”