The Berkshire Eagle of Pittsfield (Mass.), March 26:
Congressional Republicans have been out to get the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau since it was born in President Obama’s first term. The latest effort comes tucked into a budget resolution that Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, has blown the whistle on.
Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee added an amendment in which the bureau’s budget would be subject to the appropriations process. The bureau’s funding since its creation has come directly from the Federal Reserve to assure its independence from political partisanship. If its funding was at the mercy of majority Republicans doing the bidding of Wall Street, which opposed creation of the bureau, it would be bled into irrelevance in no time.
Warren was the primary architect of the CFPB and when Republicans, again acting at the bidding of Wall Street, blocked her nomination to become its first director, she decided instead to run for U.S. Senate. That worked out well for the state and nation, and she warned that “Republicans are doing everything they can to weaken financial regulations to find ways to give Wall Street the permission to take everything they can from the American people.”
In a speech March 26, President Obama endorsed the CFPB’s plan to crack down on short-term payday lending practices that result in what are known as “debt traps.” As the president explained, it is common sense to require lenders to assure that lendees have the ability to pay back their debts without being overwhelmed by penalties. Deceitful mortgage practices and mountainous consumer debt were key factors in the economic collapse that was in progress when the president took office for his first term.
The president promised that he would veto any attempts by Congress to undermine the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It should not come to that as Senate Republicans don’t have the 60 votes necessary to push measures weakening the CFPB past a Democratic filibuster. Democrats, however, must remain on guard against efforts to damage a bureau whose duty it is to protect the financial interests of the middle class ”“ and by extension the interests of the nation.
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