The president has broad authority to dismiss the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Supreme Court ruled Monday in a 5-4 decision along ideological lines.In the case of Selia Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the justices were asked to determine whether the director of the CFPB can only be removed before the end of their term “for cause” ― meaning some form of documented misconduct ― or if the president should be able to fire the director “at will,” even for nakedly political reasons.
In an opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the five conservative justices held that those restrictions on the president’s authority to remove the head of an executive branch agency are unconstitutional.
Click here to read the full story by Zach Carter at HuffPost.com.
The political significance of the case has always been much greater than the technical question at its core. Ever since Congress created the CFPB in 2010, the financial industry has been trying to disarm and destroy the agency. Between its inception and President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the CFPB returned nearly $12 billion to defrauded consumers ― money that payday lenders, Wall Street banks and others would very much like to have kept for themselves. And so, bank lawyers drafted various legal challenges to the CFPB, hoping to distract the agency with lengthy court battles and ultimately to make it impossible for the agency to function.
