The Supreme Court has ordered a restructuring of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: its single director, removable only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office, among other things, was an unconstitutional abridgment of Executive Branch authority.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the Court, said that the
setup meant the CFPB’s director was unaccountable to the executive branch, creating an unconstitutional diminishment of presidential power.
“The CFPB’s single-director structure contravenes this carefully calibrated system by vesting significant governmental power in the hands of a single individual accountable to no one[.]”
And then,
To address the problem, the court changed the CFPB removal provision to make the director subject to presidential removal for any reason.
That’s the error. The Court’s position of the unconstitutionality of the CFPB’s structure is entirely correct. The Court’s remedy is entirely wrong.
With this ruling, the Court has unconstitutionally legislated from the bench, a thing it does far too often for far too long.
The correct remedy would have been to strike the CFPB entirely as unconstitutional and return this inherently political matter to where it belongs: the political branches of the Federal government, Congress and the Executive Branch for new legislation. And to We the People, the owner-boss of our Government, both the two political and the judicial branches.