On Monday, the United States Supreme Court ruined Elizabeth Warren’s day. They did that by deciding to take a close look at “the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.” The Massachusetts senator affectionately known as “Pocahontas,” for her 1/1024th Cherokee blood, put that structure together personally. Cause of Action Institute and others call it a Democrat “slush fund.”
Supreme Court steps into slush
On Monday, February 27, The Supreme Court announced “it will review another challenge to the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.” Once Mick Mulvaney finally managed to evict Democrat deputy director Leandra English from his office, with a big legal pry bar, he begged Congress to dismantle it immediately, if not sooner.
The controversy was widely reported at the time. That’s when CEI “dubbed the education kitty a ‘slush fund‘ used by the agency for political favors.” Favoring Democrats.
The Supreme Court is putting the CFPB under their microscope after a lower court called “into question virtually every action the CFPB has taken in the 12 years since it was created.”
The Supreme Court announced Monday it would hear a challenge to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and weigh whether the agency was lawfully created and funded. https://t.co/nAtDz6Yv1W
— The Washington Times (@WashTimes) February 27, 2023
Back in 2020 SCOTUS ruled “that Congress violated the separation of powers when it placed the agency under the control of a single director who could be removed by the president only for good cause.” They stopped short, in that ruling, of pulling the plug on the whole scheme.
After the Supreme Court delivered their opinion, a trio judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit declared that “the CFPB is unconstitutionally funded.” That means everything they did was illegal. Senator Warren and her friends on the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform panel cooked up a scheme to “insulate the CFPB from political influence by making the agency independent from an annual appropriation from Congress.”
By “political influence,” they meant “Congressional oversight.” They sucked as much as they needed straight from “the operating reserves of the Federal Reserve, which itself is funded through bank assessments.” That was only one source of revenue.
Educational slush fund
Let’s flash back to January 09, 2018. That’s the day Washington Examiner reported that an “educational ‘slush fund‘ used by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has come under the ‘strictest review‘ by acting director Mick Mulvaney amid concerns the Obama-era agency has been doling out cash only to Democratic cronies.” The Supreme Court will soon be opening the whole can of worms.
Mulvaney had been serving as President Donald Trump’s budget chief until they sent him over to take a look at “all spending by the troubled consumer watchdog created to protect Americans from big financial companies.” The first thing he found is that most of the money isn’t being spent on injured consumers.
The Examiner also noted at the time that “CFPB, the brainchild of Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, collects fines from financial institutions and spends it on victims and educating the public on its mission.” Victims got pennies on the dollar, while “millions of dollars have been set aside for the education funding.”
Supreme Court agrees to resolve a legal challenge brought by business groups that claim that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s decisions should be voided because Congress does not directly fund it. https://t.co/sUEyMyULPw
— NBC News (@NBCNews) February 27, 2023
While it sounds like money going to local schools or something, that’s only an illusion. The Supreme Court will soon be considering, once again, a contract that Cause of Action Institute was concerned about. A “$14 million CFPB contract with GMMB Inc., a powerful media consulting shop that has produced political ads for Obama and 2016 runner-up Hillary Rodham Clinton.” There may be another sudden wave of suicides.
“Given CFPB’s history of stark, unabashed partisanship, as exhibited by Richard Cordray’s final bizarre gambit to try to seize control of the agency and put it in the hands of [deputy] Leandra English, it is great news that Acting Director Mulvaney is rooting out political bias, beginning with a comprehensive review of all spending,” Cause of Action counsel Eric R. Bolinder told the outlet, at the time.
Another thing that will have a lot of weight with the Supreme Court, this time around, is what Mulvaney had to say when he testified in Congress. “Such continued frustration with the Bureau’s lack of accountability to any representative branch of government should be a warning sign that a lapse in democratic structure and republican principles has occurred. This cycle will repeat ad infinitum unless Congress acts to make the Bureau accountable to the American people.“
