The Editorial Board

USA TODAY

Faced with a choice between helping their constituents or helping themselves to a campaign donation haul, House Republicans are siding with deep pockets.

All but one of the House’s 234 Republicans voted last month to gut a powerful agency — the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — that banks, credit card issuers, debt collectors and other financial players have been seeking to weaken for years. No Democrats voted in favor of the measure.

These special interests routinely shower lawmakers with campaign cash: Commercial banks and their trade association political action committees (PACs) gave Republicans running for federal office in 2016 more than $9 million, nearly 75% of their total giving. Finance and credit company PACs handed over $2.8 million to GOP candidates.

It's hard to come up with other explanations for why lawmakers would side with banking interests over regular folks who’ve won protection from scams and received millions of dollars in relief from the bureau's enforcement actions.

The bureau, created after the 2008 financial collapse, is the first federal agency to aggressively investigate and punish a wide array of financial institutions that had misled or mistreated consumers with impunity for years.

CONSUMER BANKERS ASSOCIATION:

Change how CFPB is run

The House measure, part of a larger effort to dismantle restraints on banks approved after the collapse, would eliminate or weaken just about every authority the agency has to protect consumers against breathtaking rip-offs, such as Wells Fargo’s opening of fake bank accounts for customers who knew nothing about the accounts.

The measure's most harmful changes would:

Eliminate the CFPB’s broad powers to investigate and punish unfair, deceptive or abusive practices, the tool it has used to collect nearly $12 billion in relief for millions of consumers. While other federal banking agencies have similar authority, they have seldom used it to consumers’ benefit.

Hide from public view a complaint database that allows consumers to seek help to resolve their own complaints and check the complaints against businesses and institutions regulated by the bureau. Hiding the database means that consumers lose leverage to force an end to abusive practices, and bad actors can continue victimizing new customers.

Threaten the existence of specialized offices, created under the consumer agency, that help students, senior citizens and veterans with financial issues. Its Office of Servicemember Affairs, for instance, has brought a dozen actions against high-cost lenders that prey upon military members, who can lose their security clearances when they get too deeply in debt.

Eliminate the agency’s authority to write new rules for small-dollar, high-cost loans by payday lenders and businesses that use car titles as collateral. Such loans target vulnerable people. Those who can’t pay off the high interest wind up in spiraling debt or losing their cars. Squashing this part of the bureau's job description is a brazen gift to these lenders.

Critics of the bureau have been pushing to weaken it since it opened in 2011. The latest effort would make the director vulnerable to firing at the president's whim. Currently, the director can be fired only for cause, including “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance” — a provision designed to insulate him from political pressure. Another wish floated by bankers is to turn the bureau into a five-member bipartisan commission, a change proposed in a Senate measure. The problem is the Senate can too easily stymie commissions by rejecting nominees or leaving them hanging. Commissions can also become deadlocked and do nothing, which would please much of the banking community.

The only real problem with CFPB Director Richard Cordray and his agency is they’ve done their job too well, protecting consumers from frauds by some financial institutions, which long for the days when there was no financial cop on the beat.

USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.

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