It’s just damn odd that a country would choose a man whose tag-line is “you’re fired” as its mascot. Yes, we get his special appeal to the half of the country which believes in white supremacy, but it’s still just weird that they couldn’t find a white champion who believed in, I don’t know, NOT firing people.
Anyway, Donald Trump is here and he apparently spends a lot of time thinking about who he can fire: Robert Mueller, Jeff Sessions, Sally Yates, Anthony Scaramucci, he doesn’t get all the scalps he wants, but he clearly believes that everybody in the federal government serves at his pleasure.
It’ll be left to the courts, as usual, to tell him that he is wrong. Today, the D.C. Circuit got the rare opportunity to tell Trump he’s wrong about something before Trump even asked the question.
In response to a challenge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s very existence, the D.C. Circuit ruled that the board was constitutional and its director can only be fired for malfeasance. Bloomberg reports:
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director’s job regained a measure of security Wednesday when a U.S. appeals court said the agency head can only be fired for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,” in a blow to the Trump administration.
Replacing an earlier ruling that the CFPB’s structure was unconstitutional and that there were insufficient checks on the power of its director, the Washington-based appeals court concluded that Congress meant to protect the agency from the ebb and flow of politics and that its director should only be dismissed for cause.
That’s not how the Trump administration sees it, and they are likely to appeal to the Supreme Court. Ever since the CFPB was conjured into existence by Elizabeth Warren in 2010, there has been an effort to kill it backed by big business. Their hatred for the CFPB seems out of scale for what it’s actually empowered to do, and the Sanders/Warren wing love for the CFPB ALSO SEEMS out of whack with what the thing is actually able to do. I mean it’s important, but Jesus. We’ve arguably installed the most corrupt president in American history, it’s hard to go to the mattresses over some predatory interest rates.
In any event, former head of the CFPB, Richard Cordray, isn’t around to see his office protected. He resigned in November. The story is that he really wanted to run for Governor of Ohio, which he is doing. Most likely his resignation also had something to do with averting a mini constitutional crisis with Trump.
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Resigning preserves the concept that the president can’t fire the head of the CFPB. It’s great that the D.C. Circuit affirmed that message. But, this is still Trump’s world. He is going to fire somebody he’s not supposed to. Will the courts have the backbone to stand up to him then?
Will the military? These are literally the questions America has for itself in 2018.
Court Ruling on CFPB Director Deals Blow to Trump Administration [Bloomberg]
Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at [email protected]. He will resist.