Not far from the White House, the building that is supposed to be the permanent home of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is nearly complete. This is assuming that, under the rule of the president*, and congressional majorities steeped in the politics and policies that made him inevitable, and a Supreme Court sliding toward a solid majority derived from that very same brand of modern conservatism, anything in our politics can be said to be permanent.

The CFPB is now in the middle of a signifying political bloodbath, the ramifications of which go far beyond the survival of that newly hatched institution, although its survival is important enough, especially to the citizens who got back some of the $12 billion the CFPB clawed away from the voracious tentacles of the swindlers in the financial services sector, where the business plan usually includes fraud. CNN surveys the terrain as the whole thing moves to court.

Lawyers for Leandra English, whom Cordray named the effective acting director when he resigned on Friday, filed the lawsuit in the US District Court for the District of Columbia seeking to halt the appointment of Mulvaney, who serves as head of the Office of Management and Budget and is also named in the lawsuit. Both Mulvaney and English were present at the CFBP Monday morning. Mulvaney was given full access to the CFPB director's office with "full cooperation" from its staff, a senior White House official told CNN, adding that the OMB director brought doughnuts for his new staff. English, according to a source familiar with the matter, also was present at the bureau Monday morning, but it was not immediately clear if she and Mulvaney interacted. English's move marks a stunning turn of events at the agency, which was created after the financial crisis to protect consumers and keep an eye on Wall Street. While serving in Congress, Mulvaney voted in favor of killing the bureau, arguing it has too much power and issues unduly harsh regulations, and he has worked alongside Trump to roll back some of the agency's rules.

According to the legislation that set up the CFPB, English has the proper claim to the office. This is because the CFPB deliberately was set up to be as independent as possible from presidential political influence—in short, to keep people like this president* from installing a crony like Mick Mulvaney in the job of shredding the agency he’s supposed to be running. This argument insists that English should run the CFPB until the president* nominates, and the Senate confirms, a proper successor to Cordray. Mulvaney’s case is based on something called the Vacancy Reform Act of 1998, which obviously predates the law establishing the CFPB.

Mick Mulvaney Getty Images

In this matter, the current president* again is behaving in a manner quite typical of recent Republican presidents. This is how the last Republican administration played scandalous shenanigans with the Department of Justice. This is why the Reagan administration stuck people like James Watt in at Interior, and Silent Sam Pierce in at HUD. The only difference is that one of the people behind this president*, Steve Bannon, the last heir to House Harkonnen, hung a high-falutin’ think-tank name on this traditional conservative vandalism: “deconstructing the administrative state.”

The way you know that the president* is acting in this matter very much in keeping with current conservative ideology is that our current conservatives have lined up staunchly behind him. For example, Senator Tom Cotton, the bobblethroated slapdick from Arkansas, is pretending to be smart at the top of his lungs again.

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, a member of the Banking Committee and longtime critic of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, called English's lawsuit "just the latest lawless action" by the agency, which he labeled "rogue" and "unconstitutional" in a statement Sunday night. "The President should fire her immediately and anyone who disobeys Director Mulvaney's orders should also be fired summarily," Cotton said. "The Constitution and the law must prevail against the supposed resistance."

“The supposed resistance”? I think ol’ Tom believes that the CFPB is staffed with people in black balaclavas. I’m sure Cotton’s hysteria has nothing at all to do with the $1.5 million that the good folks at opensecrets.org report that his campaign fund has received from the “securities and investment” industries. Come to think of it, before he signed on as the president*’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney was gifted with over 400-large from those same banking interests.

Tom Cotton

(And, before I forget, if Richard Cordray really does run for governor of Ohio next year, Ohio Democratic primary voters would be well within their rights to ask him why he threw his vulnerable agency to the wolves on behalf of his own political ambitions.)



But there is more to it than simply who runs an agency that the Republicans and their donor classes hate. Even Ronald Reagan wasn’t bold enough to pick a member of his White House staff as Secretary of the Interior. Mulvaney is still the director of the Office of Management and Budget, as important a sub-Cabinet job as there is. Even for this job, he’s painfully unqualified, being basically a garden-variety Tea Party hack with no grounding in economics beyond whatever he last read in a mass email from Heritage.

Getty Images

Now, he’s supposed to run two vital financial agencies at once, including one that he’s already called a “sick, sad joke,” and we’re supposed to buy this as normal? This is what dictators do. They stuff the government full of reliable cronies whose interests are detached utterly from the people they’re supposed to serve. That’s how billions of dollars in mineral rights from impoverished little countries end up in banks in Switzerland and the Caymans. They’re always good at deconstructing things, the dictators are. It’s one of their only real talents.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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