Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Republicans Have Found a Nuclear Option to Kill Regulations

"On Tuesday night, Trump will double down on his broken promises"
[...]
"The president who promised to be on the side of working people instead lined up with those who rig the rules against them.
When he promised to “drain the swamp,” he apparently meant — as Consumer Financial Protection Bureau head Mick
Mulvaney explained — to drain the government of civil servants, who protect citizens from corporate abuses."

Gary Rivlin

April 21 2018, 7:22 a.m.

Mick Mulvaney, since November the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, could have killed an Obama-era directive cracking down on discriminatory lending on auto sales with a snap of his fingers. In 2013, the new bureau put auto dealers and the finance companies they work with on notice: We have found evidence that auto loans are often marked up for Latino and African-American customers, and will be monitoring your compliance with fair lending laws. Study after study had shown that people of color typically pay higher fees and higher interest rates on car loans than whites with similar credit profiles. The CFPB didn’t wait to create a formal rule, instead issuing a “guidance” bulletin. Mulvaney could have undone that guidance simply by writing his own. But that wasn’t enough for Mulvaney, who, as a member of Congress, had sponsored a bill to eliminate the bureau entirely.

Instead, on Wednesday, the Senate took action, voting 51-47 to overturn the guidance.

When Congress strikes down an agency action, the consequences are far more permanent. “Once Congress passes a resolution disapproving of something like this, the agency is prohibited from ever doing anything substantially similar,” said Debbie Goldstein, who oversees federal policy at the Center for Responsible Lending. If passed by the House and signed by President Donald Trump, Goldstein said, “This would tie the hands of future CFPBs.”

The Senate vote was also the test launch for a new, potentially lethal weapon that could be used to blast into oblivion a wide range of regulations that industries do not like. “Agencies probably issue a thousand binding regulations in a year. Maybe a couple of thousand,” said James Goodwin, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Progressive Reform, a nonprofit research and advocacy group. “We’re talking about an unimaginably large universe of stuff suddenly in play.”

https://theintercept.com/2018/04/20/republicans-have-found-a-nuclear-option-to-kill-regulations/

Talk about putting an agency into a straitjacket. Surely it can't be as restrictive as Goldstein puts it there. Maybe in the future it may come down to the way
"substantially similar" is defined (if it is) in the legislation, and the interpretation of that. Whatever, on the strength only of the above it should go into the garbage.