Friday, December 01, 2017

A WARNING FROM MULVANEY: The Power Wielded by the CFPB Should Really "Frighten People"

By William Teach

Nothing like giving unelected bureaucrats massive power that is unchecked by the citizens' duly elected lawmakers:

White House budget chief Mick Mulvaney said Thursday that the authority wielded by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) chief “should frighten people” days after he assumed the role of acting director.

Mulvaney, who also serves as the director of Office of Management and Budget, said on Fox Business Network’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight” that the structure of the CFPB is “fundamentally flawed” and that his directive as its administrator would be to “limit” the agency’s effect on capitalism.

“The structure of the CFPB is just fundamentally flawed. Authority that I have now as the acting director really should frighten people,” Mulvaney said.

“You can sit down in a room with three or four people, and say, well, let’s go off and do this, and there is no accountability to Congress. I could set the budget pretty much without any input from Congress, in fact, without any input from Congress,” he added.

And the Democrats who designed this intentionally made it so.

Remember, only two Republicans, Collins and Brown, voted for Dodd-Frank in the Senate. No Democrats voted against. In the House, 3 Republicans said yea, only 19 Democrats said no.

So this was pretty much an utterly partisan piece of legislation. Of course, Democrats love the notion of another massive federal government agency which has virtually no controls placed upon it by anyone, especially those stupid citizens. Well, right up to it bones them personally.

It would be funny as hell if Trump and Mulvaney used to power of the CFPB to go full bore after Democrat party supporting companies, wouldn’t it? Teach them a lesson in “things can backfire badly”? From a hypothetical point of view, though.

Read more at The Pirate's Cove.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What a constitutional monstrosity! As a branch of the Federal Reserve Corporation (yes, it is a federally chartered corporation, actually more than one), it was not only self-funding, but could pass judgment on the actions of the broad range of business that it was to regulate, and then it was free to direct those fines as it pleased. It turns out that it imposed "settlements" that forced the target firms to "donate" to favored leftist causes, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

With no effective constraints due to budget, the CFPB was going to expand its powers until it became politically odious. But we see with ObamaCare how difficult it is for Congress to repeal some federal activity no matter how odious it really is.

-- TheBuckWheat