 |
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) delivered the following opening statement at a hearing with the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (CFPB) Acting Director Mick Mulvaney:
This morning, we welcome home Mick Mulvaney, a highly respected former member of this very Committee, the Director of the OMB, and the Acting Director of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. He is here to deliver the Bureau’s latest semi-annual report to Congress.
When Richard Cordray was Director of the CFPB, I maintained it was perhaps the single most powerful and unaccountable agency in the history of the Republic. Now that Mick Mulvaney is Acting Director, I still maintain that the CFPB is the most powerful and unaccountable agency in the history of the Republic.
Democrats chose to insulate it from Congress, the president, courts, voters and the democratic process.
The CFPB is unaccountable to the president because the Director can only be removed for cause. The CFPB is unaccountable to Congress because it determines its own funding stream… The CFPB is unaccountable to the courts because it benefits from the Chevron doctrine… The CFPB is unaccountable to…well, the CFPB because there’s really not even a “them.” In this case, there just happens to be a “him.” No commission. No board. No effective oversight.
So powerful is the CFPB Director that he alone has been granted the unprecedented power to declare any mortgage, credit card, or bank account unfair or abusive, at which point, Americans can’t have them, even if they need them, want them, and can afford them. The fact that the CFPB Director has such power is, itself, unfair and abusive, and is an affront to the personal freedom of every American citizen.
While the Bureau retains all of these unbridled powers and remains unaccountable under Acting Director Mulvaney, there is one distinction: Director Cordray often acted unlawfully; Acting Director Mulvaney acts lawfully. What a welcome change.
For example, in the PHH case, the facts show that Mr. Cordray unilaterally reversed decades of accepted law with regards to RESPA, and did so without formal rulemaking—no comment, no due process, no notice. Then, to make matters worse, Mr. Cordray attempted to apply this new, rogue standard retroactively. Fortunately, these actions were held unlawful by the en banc D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
And that is just one example.
We also know that, in many respects, consumers have been harmed by the CFPB.
One example: according to researchers at the University of Maryland, the CFPB’s Qualified Mortgage rule harmed middle-income borrowers who not only “didn’t obtain cheaper mortgages, but were cut out of the mortgage market altogether.”
I must admit it is sheer irony and great comic relief to see the wailing and gnashing of teeth of many of my Democratic colleagues who now denounce the unaccountable nature of the CFPB, but only because now a Republican is in control. I ask, “Where have you been?”
The good news is we have an Acting Director before us today who is actually asking our assistance in reforming the CFPB. If our Democrat colleagues wish for the Bureau to be accountable and responsive, please work with us to ensure we do just that.