Free Republic

Since its inception in 2011, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has been the bureaucratic boogeyman in Washington’s regulatory funhouse -- a clunky Frankenstein monster stitched together to supposedly protect consumers, but seemingly engineered to duck accountability and congressional oversight while gleefully slathering red tape over financial institutions. The CFPB was designed to be practically untouchable, a regulatory juggernaut armed with unchecked authority to dish out burdensome rules that are often more about power than protection. And for the better part of the last decade, it’s been strutting around like it owns the place. But that party may finally be...

2010 was a bad year for the Constitution. Not only did Congress saddle us with the misnamed Affordable Care Act, which has caused a legal war over its highly questionable constitutionality, but it also passed the Dodd-Frank Act, which created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The CFPB was the brainchild of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) and her idea was to make it an independent agency – amazingly, unconstitutionally independent agency. Consider, for example, the way CFPB is funded. Unlike every other federal regulatory agency, which gets its budget through congressional appropriation, CFPB gets its money directly from the Federal...