Fannie Mae-No Politics (FNMA)

[Robert from yahoo bd]

Clearly a healthy dose of skepticism is in order! I know everyone (including me) wants their companies and their money back after 14+ years of these Gubmint shenanigans.

But NONE of my other investments have given me an opportunity to enlighten myself so much about the Administrative State and its massive interference with everyday Americans lives.

Check this out: "Rather than make the Bureau’s funding subject to the give and take of the annual appropriations process, like every other non-entitlement expenditure, Congress decided to put the CFPB’s funding off limits in exchange for surrendering its own future spending power. The Democrat majority in the 111th Congress was at a high-water mark of fifty-nine senators, a dominance not seen since Jimmy Carter lost re-election to Ronald Reagan (and not seen since the 111th Congress, either). A funding mechanism that indefinitely surrenders power to a complicit executive, in order to instantiate the legislative will of a transient majority in Congress—and tie the hands of future congresses—is undoubtedly clever. But it is nonetheless a bargain that the Supreme Court must unwind because it unconstitutionally divests Article I power.

If Title X of Dodd-Frank does supply an “intelligible principle” under current doctrine, then that is a powerful indictment of existing law. No proper interpretation of Article I, § 1 can permit Congress to delegate a core legislative power like the power of the purse.

How Seila Law Makes CFPB’s Nondelegation Problem Worse
If the Court was not already poised to reject the CFPB’s funding structure before, it certainly ought to be in the aftermath of Seila Law. Perhaps unwittingly, the Court’s decision has made the CFPB’s funding regime even less tenable. How? After Seila Law, the president, without input from Congress, is the final authority on the amount of the CFPB’s funding: because the president can now remove the director of the Bureau at will, the director’s preferences in this regard will only matter as much as the president allows.

Hence, by severing the director’s for-cause removal protection, the Supreme Court has put the president more or less directly in charge of over 12 percent of the funds generated by the Federal Reserve each year: more than $650 million in fiscal year 2020. Title X of Dodd-Frank unconstitutionally ceded Congress’s exclusive funding authority to the CFPB. But Seila Law has now changed the law so that it cedes core appropriations power directly to the President of the United States. It would be difficult to construct a more direct violation of the nondelegation doctrine. And remember that the law does not allow the House or Senate Appropriations Committees to review how those funds are spent. If the line-item veto was unconstitutional, then a fortiori turning over this much appropriations control to the president must be unconstitutional too.

To better understand the breathtaking scope of legislative power now ceded the president, consider the following thought experiment: Suppose President Donald Trump instructed the Bureau’s director to request only one dollar for the next quarter of its operations. Could he do that? Nothing in Title X or Seila Law appears to preclude such a move. Congress might object that that sum is less than “reasonably necessary to carry out the authorities of the Bureau under Federal consumer financial law.” But how would Congress enforce such a belief, after having ceded to the director the authority and discretion to decide how much funding to request? Thus, President Trump could cripple the entire agency by unilaterally defunding it. He could not withhold appropriated funds from any other agency due to the Impoundment Control Act. Indeed, his purported violation of that Act in (temporarily) withholding appropriated funds from Ukraine formed the basis of the first article of impeachment lodged against him."

https://lawreviewblog.uchicago.edu/2020/08/27/seila-chenoweth-degrandis/