Acting Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CPFB) Mick Mulvaney (also Office of Management and Budget director) is no fan of the agency that he runs, having called it a “sick, sad joke” and “essentially a one-person dictator[ship].” The CFPB, a brain-child proposed by left-wing Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren as far back as 2007, was specifically and deliberately designed to circumvent all constitutional limits on its activities. Part of the Dodd-Frank bill that was passed in 2010 in response to the financial crisis of 2007-2008, the CPFB is headquartered inside the Federal Reserve offices in Washington and is funded by the Fed rather than Congress. There is no congressional oversight on its activities, and efforts to declare the agency unconstitutional have failed. Worse, it violates the “separation of powers” doctrine that informed the Founders as they designed the Constitution: It writes its own laws, it investigates any violations of those laws, and then fines those who violate them. Finally, and most egregiously, it takes the money from those fines and passes them on to left-wing groups to help fund anti-American activities.
In a lawsuit filed by Connecticut attorney Kimberly Pisinski in July 2013, Pisinski alleged that the “CFPB’s structure insulates it from political accountability and internal checks and balances in violation of the United States Constitution. Unbridled from constitutionally-required accountability, CFPB has engaged in ultra vires [“beyond the powers”] and abusive practices, including attempts to regulate the practice of law … attempts to collect attorney-client protected material and overreaching demands for, and mining of, personal financial information of American citizens, which has prompted a Government Accountability Office investigation.”
