On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association of America.
The case is a challenge to the funding mechanism that Congress set up for the CFPB when it created the consumer-finance watchdog agency as part of the Dodd-Frank financial reforms in 2011.
Unlike some other federal agencies that receive annual appropriations from lawmakers, Congress allows the CFPB to draw its funding directly from an account in the Federal Reserve System.
Congress has allowed federal agencies to receive funding from a variety of different sources, and it retains the power to change those arrangements whenever it sees fit.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed. Judge Cory Wilson, writing for a unanimous three-judge panel, described the funding mechanism as a violation of the appropriations clause as well as a blow to the separation of powers.
“Even among self-funded agencies, the Bureau is unique,” Wilson claimed, quoting from precedent. “The Bureau’s perpetual self-directed, double-insulated funding structure goes a significant step further than that enjoyed by the other agencies on offer. And none of the agencies cited above ‘wields enforcement or regulatory authority remotely comparable to the authority the [Bureau] may exercise throughout the economy.’”
Wilson’s opinion echoed the widespread belief in the conservative legal movement that the CFPB is a dangerous threat to liberty and must be either reined in or destroyed.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority, which appears similarly skeptical of the consumer-finance watchdog, previously dismantled the statutory for-cause protections for the CFPB’s director in 2018.
In one notable exchange on Capitol Hill, a Republican lawmaker from Pennsylvania told CFPB Director Rohit Chopra during a congressional hearing earlier this year that the financial industry was not happy with the agency’s work and urged her to “be responsive to the clientele that you’re supposed to be helping” when adopting new policies and regulations.
“Just to be clear, the clientele of the CFPB is not banks,” Chopra responded. “The clientele is the public"
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https://newrepublic.com/article/175899/supreme-court-watch-chevron-deference
