Screwing Consumers, One Filibuster at a Time

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Here on the left, everyone has long wanted President Obama to nominate Elizabeth Warren to head up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It was mostly her brainchild, after all, and she’s been running it on an interim basis for nearly a year (as a “special advisor” to the president). But opposition to her appointment is strong, and over the weekend Obama decided instead to nominate Richard Cordray, a former Ohio attorney general who’s been running the enforcement arm of the CFPB since December.

The problem with this is that Warren isn’t the only potential head of the CFPB that Republicans dislike enough to filibuster. In fact, they dislike all of them. But it’s not personal, just business. They hate the whole idea of the CFPB so much that they’ve promised to keep anyone from running the agency unless some changes are made. Mike Konczal elaborates:

What are the strengths of the way the CFPB is structured in the Dodd-Frank Act? There are many, especially the consolidation of consumer regulation and focus on research. But three structural strengths stand out: it has a single director, there’s been careful attention paid to its budgeting process and it is just like other regulators in terms of accountability but with focus on consumer protection as its primary goal. These three parts of the CFPB were carefully planned, designed and fought for.

….[Those three] major strengths — a director, funding and accountability with a focus on consumer protection — are exactly what the Republicans want to dismantle. No doubt they are trying to stall and annoy the implementation of Dodd-Frank and prevent the CFPB from doing all its work — of course they are — but if there were three critical points where they could significantly weaken what the CFPB can do, these would be those three.

So there you have it. Republicans want to emasculate the agency almost completely because big banks don’t much like the idea of a consumer protection bureau. One way to do that is to change the operation of the agency in a way that makes it toothless. Another way is to prevent confirmation of a director, since several of its most important powers are only allowed to be carried out by a Senate-confirmed director and those powers become dead letters if they filibuster every possible candidate. That’s what Republicans have promised to do, and it’s why Ezra Klein thinks it’s hardly a huge loss that Obama didn’t nominate Warren:

Whoever is nominated to lead the CFPB is going to spend the next year of his life being filibustered by Republicans. The very best he can hope for is a recess appointment, in which case his tenure in the position would be relatively swift. So the question isn’t who you want leading the CFPB for the foreseeable future. It’s who you want spending his or her time being stopped from leading the CFPB for the foreseeable future. And it’s not clear that the answer to that question is “Elizabeth Warren.”

The real question is, why would anyone want to be this person? Richard Cordray knows what he’s in for, so why is he doing it? It’s mysterious. But then again, Cordray is a five-time Jeopardy! champion, so maybe he has something up his sleeve that the rest of us can only guess at. Wait and see.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate