If you walk down a certain route past the White House and toward the National Mall, you will pass the half-built offices of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the brainchild of Senator Professor Warren, and one of the most toothsome elements of the embattled Dodd-Frank financial reform package. Now, the general position of the Republicans in command of all the institutions of the national government is that Dodd-Frank is generally a drag on American business—which implies, of course, that a certain amount of fraud is essential to the proper functioning of the American corporate economy.

But the CFPB has had the brightest and biggest bullseye placed on it. It has clawed back billions of dollars to people who were paper-whipped and small-printed out of their money by various financial leviathans. One of the provisions that guaranteed the CFPB could do its job properly is the provision by which its director could be removed only "for cause" during his five-year term. In other words, except for cause, the current president* couldn't replace the current director until 2018. However, many ambitious corporations don't want to wait that long.

One of them is the PHH Corporation, a mortgage-lending company that, in 2015, the bureau whacked with a $109 million fine for a kickback scheme involving PHH and mortgage lenders to whom the company referred its customers. PHH has responded with a lawsuit that not only seeks to reverse that judgment, but to effectively demolish the CFPB on constitutional grounds. From BuzzFeed:

A private company that challenged the constitutionality of the agency scored a win last year, when a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit found in a 2-1 decision that having a single director who could only be removed "for cause" was unconstitutional. The court didn't go as far as to say the agency in its entirety was unconstitutional, but the ruling would still lead to a big change in the relationship between the director and the president. The full DC Circuit agreed to take up the case, and heard arguments on Wednesday morning. The questioning this time seemed to lean in favor of the bureau, with more judges expressing skepticism at the challengers' argument that the scope of the director's authority and the structure of the bureau diminished the president's authority.

(By the way, in case you were wondering, the mortgage companies and their allied financial institutions are back to their old tricks again, as the invaluable Dave Dayen has been saying. And there's a foreclosure king running the Treasury Department.)

God, there's a lot going on under the radar these days. An important constitutional question has been raised in order to get out from under an egregious kickback scheme run by a company profiting off human misery in an attempt to destroy a government agency designed to punish that behavior and mitigate the misery. I think they at least could have waited until the building was finished.

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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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