The Constitutional Case Against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Writing at The Washington Post, George Will makes the case against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal "watchdog" empowered to forbid "unfair, deceptive, or abusive" financial practices. As Will puts it, "judicial dismantling of the CFPB would affirm the rule of law and Congress's constitutional role." He explains:

The CFPB's director, Richard Cordray, was installed by one of Barack Obama's spurious recess appointmentswhen the Senate was not in recess. Vitiating the Senate's power to advise and consent to presidential appointments is congruent with the CFPB's general lawlessness.

The CFPB nullifies Congress's power to use the power of the purse to control bureaucracies because its funding — "determined by the director" — comes not from congressional appropriations but from the Federal Reserve. Untethered from all three branches of government, unlike anything created since 1789, the CFPB is uniquely sovereign: The president appoints the director for a five-year term — he can stay indefinitely, if no successor is confirmed — and the director can be removed, but not for policy reasons….

Like the Independent Payment Advisory Board, Obamacare's health-care rationing panel, the CFPB embodies progressivism's authoritarianism — removing much policymaking from elected representatives and entrusting it to unaccountable "experts" exercising an unfettered discretion incompatible with the rule of law.

Read the whole thing here.