The anti-Democratic CFPB

This is all over the news this morning, e.g., at the Wall Street Journal (an article inexplicably outside the paywall)

An Obama-era official at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued the Trump administration on Sunday night to block budget director Mick Mulvaney from taking control of the agency.

Leandra English, a career staffer appointed Friday to lead the CFPB by former director Richard Cordray, filed the lawsuit in federal court the night before the bureau was set to reopen with dueling temporary leaders vying to take it over. In doing so, she touched off a legal fight that will trigger court interpretations on how different statutes regarding succession apply to the unusual struggle over control of a federal agency.

President Donald Trump asserts he has the power to appoint an acting director, while the departing chief believed the law said otherwise.

Last-minute maneuvering by Mr. Cordray means that come Monday morning, two officials have a claim on the acting top job: Mr. Mulvaney, who also serves as head of the Office of Management and Budget, and Ms. English.

Allahpundit at HotAir.com has a good explanation of the details:  Cordray appointed English as deputy director immediately before resigning, and his supporters claim that, in the absense of the director, the “deputy director” takes over, rather than, as would be the usual case, the president having the power to appoint an acting director until the vacancy is filled.  But

[the legal text these defenders are pointing to] doesn’t say that the deputy director becomes acting director in the event of a “vacancy.” It says she becomes acting director if the director is “absent” or “unavailable.” Cordray is neither of those things; he’s not the director at all anymore!

Why does it matter?  Allahpundit continues,

Trump gets to appoint Cordray’s permanent successor, of course, but it’ll take time to find a candidate, to hold the requisite Senate confirmation hearing, and to have a floor vote. If the Senate were controlled by Democrats, Schumer could conceivably delay confirmation hearings indefinitely or get his caucus to serially Bork anyone whom Trump nominates, leaving English in charge indefinitely. As it is, the GOP is eager to being remaking the CFPB and doesn’t want to wait months to get cracking. But that’s the position it’ll be in if the courts side with Cordray’s authority to fill his own vacancy rather than Trump’s.

And, while he reports that the consensus is that the law is on Trump’s side, Cordray had political reasons for his actions; he’s running for governor, and

The surest way to earn cheap goodwill from the left is to make a showy gesture of sticking it to Trump. That’s what Cordray did by deputizing English and forcing a court battle. The fact that he’ll lose isn’t the point. The fact that he “fought” Trump is the point.

For a bureaucratic agency’s head to believe he can appoint his own successor, and reject accountability is fundamentally anti-democratic.  But according to Ronald L. Rubin writing at the National Review, this action is just part of a systemic rejection of sound governance, or any checks or controls.

Meanwhile, millions of dollars were diverted from the CFPB to Democratic allies. From 2014 to 2017, the bureau paid $11 million a year to rent office space in an Obama fundraiser’s building. The Dodd-Frank Act allowed the CFPB to send the civil money penalties collected in its enforcement actions to a trustee of its choice, who, after taking a healthy cut, distributed the funds to ostensible victims in unrelated matters. The maneuver both enriched Democratic trustees and transformed fines extracted from defenseless businesses based on their deep pockets rather than actual consumer harm into “over $12 billion in damages returned to 29 million injured consumers.” To spread such propaganda, the bureau paid over $43 million to GMMB, the liberal advocacy group that created ads for the Obama and Hillary Clinton presidential campaigns.

Back in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, anti-Trump protestors loved to chant, “this is what democracy looks like.”

From all reports, the CFPB is not “what democracy looks like.”

Image:  https://media.defense.gov/2014/Jul/16/2000832460/-1/-1/0/140716-F-SF323-001.JPG; http://www.hanscom.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/847419/consumer-tips-on-avoiding-scammers/