At issue is whether the for-cause removal provision of the law violates the Constitution’s separation of powers clause, as a California debt-relief firm, Seila Law LLC, is arguing. Seila is challenging a so-called investigative demand by the CFPB, which is tantamount to a subpoena.

In an unusual move that highlights the case’s political sensitivity, the Trump administration in September reversed its position and said it agreed that the bureau is unconstitutionally structured. That led the Supreme Court to tap former solicitor general and conservative legal star Paul Clement to defend the agency. Democrats in Congress have filed amicus briefs defending the bureau.

From the start, the CFPB — the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren, then a law professor at Harvard — was polarizing, with Democrats casting it as a long-overdue cop on the beat for consumers after the financial crisis and Republicans deriding the new agency as a symbol of regulatory overreach.

Where Democrats stress the need to isolate the bureau from political pressures, Republicans see unaccountability. GOP lawmakers have fought for years to replace the director setup with a bipartisan commission structure akin to the leadership of other financial regulators and to bring the agency’s budget into the congressional appropriations process. The CFPB is currently funded by the Federal Reserve instead, in another effort to shield it from political influence.

Seila Law is arguing that the CFPB director effectively answers to no one. The company said in its petition for the court to take up the case that the justices shouldn’t wait until a president attempts to remove an official because the “separation-of-powers problem … infects every executive action an unconstitutionally structured agency takes.”

Clement says the for-cause removal provision is actually fairly broad and does not significantly constrain the president’s executive authority. He argues that “the statutory terms do not erect any hard and fast rules about precisely how good the president’s good cause must be,” as he put it in his brief to the court.

“Moreover, in an actual contested removal, the President would certainly be entitled to substantial deference in identifying inefficiency, neglect, or malfeasance,” Clement wrote.

The Court will also hear arguments on whether the for-cause provision can be severed from the rest of the statute that created the CFPB if it is found unconstitutional — a question that splits Republicans.

House Republicans, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and two dozen House Financial Services Committee members, argued in a brief that the removal restriction is not severable from the rest of that section of Dodd-Frank and that the court should “invalidate the statutory powers” of the CFPB and send the issue back to Congress.

Yet it's unlikely that a divided Congress would easily find a legislative remedy.

The Trump administration wants the court to rule more narrowly by chucking the removal clause while allowing the CFPB to “continue the critical work of implementing the consumer financial protection laws” without throwing existing regulations into uncertainty, according to a Justice Department brief filed last month.

It’s an approach that at least one Supreme Court Justice agrees with: As a federal appeals court judge, Brett Kavanaugh held that the CFPB’s structure is unconstitutional but that the appropriate remedy was to sever the removal clause from the law.

Business groups have taken a similar stance, arguing that invalidating the CFPB as a whole would cause regulatory chaos. A brief from the Mortgage Bankers Association, for instance, warned that striking down the entire statute “would immediately cause significant disruption to the American economy” and create “substantial uncertainty in our housing markets.”

In addition to the banks, student loan companies and debt collectors with business before the CFPB, housing industry analysts are closely watching the case.

The Supreme Court Justices have not acted on a petition challenging the leadership structure of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which a lower court ruled unconstitutional in September.