On Wednesday, 11 D.C. Circuit Court judges will hear arguments over the constitutionality of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency created in the wake of the great recession of 2008.

The stakes are high for both consumer protection advocates and financial services institutions. The latter have, in the past five years, been ordered by the CFPB to return nearly $12 billion to 29 million of their customers in recompense for various predatory practices. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform legislation of 2010 created the CFPB and gave it power to enforce 18 consumer protection laws previously administered by seven separate agencies, and also vested it with new authority to regulate and prosecute “unfair, deceptive, and abusive” acts.

Conceived in 2007 by then-Harvard law professor and now-Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts)—today, the personification of a liberal firebrand—the CFPB has been a political lightning rod since its inception. It has fought to rein in deceptive practices in such realms as subprime mortgages, payday lending, nonprofit education, and prepaid debit cards, with Republicans screeching in protest all the way.

In February Senator David Perdue (R-Georgia), the former CEO of Reebok and Dollar General Stores, whose state is home to TSYS—the parent of prepaid card unit Netspend—branded CFPB a “rogue agency” at Yahoo Finance’s All Markets Summit; Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) introduced bills to abolish the bureau; and, according to a report in Politico last month, President Donald Trump recently threatened to fire its director, Richard Cordray, a former Ohio attorney general.

View photos Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Richard Cordray testifies during a hearing before the Senate on April 7, 2016. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images More

As it happens, Trump can’t currently fire Cordray, and that’s precisely what lies at the heart of the legal dispute the D.C. Circuit judges will be pondering. In the lawsuit, PHH Corp, a mortgage lender, is challenging the constitutionality of the CFPB’s structure. In January 2014 the bureau brought an enforcement proceeding against PHH which culminated, in July 2015, in the imposition of $109 million in fines against the company for its allegedly having participated in a kickback scheme.

PHH appealed, protesting not only its innocence, but also claiming that Congress violated constitutional separation of powers principles when it specified that the president could remove the director of the CFPB only for cause (e.g., neglect of duty or malfeasance) rather than at will (e.g., for mere policy differences). This arrangement granted the director too much insulation from public accountability, PHH claimed, thereby threatening the liberty of those who fall within the CFPB’s enforcement jurisdiction.

View photos Elizabeth Warren originally proposed the creation of the CFPB. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images More

A 2-1 panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals agreed with PHH’s argument last October. “The Director [of the CFPB] enjoys more unilateral authority than any other officer in any of the three branches of the U.S. Government, other than the President,” wrote U.S. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh in declaring the CFPB’s structure to be unconstitutional. (Regardless of the constitutional issue, all three judges voted to vacate PHH’s fine on the grounds that CFPB had misinterpreted the statutes relating to PHH’s conduct. The one dissenting judge found it unnecessary to reach the constitutional question.)

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