Signage on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Andrew Kelly | Reuters
WASHINGTON — Greater than 140 current and former Democratic lawmakers filed an amicus temporary within the Supreme Court on Monday to defend the country’s leading consumer protection agency from challenges to its regulatory authority.
The temporary — led by Democrats Sen. Sherrod Brown, of Ohio, and Rep. Maxine Waters, of California — pertains to the case Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association of America, which challenges the constitutionality of the agency and would undermine its funding and mandated authorities.
Brown chairs the Senate Banking Committee, while Waters is the rating member of the House Financial Services Committee.
Upholding an appeals court decision that undermined the agency’s funding mechanism “would place in danger a funding model that has been used because the early Republic, which now applies to the [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] and a bunch of other crucial federal programs,” the lawmakers wrote.
Democratic House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, each of Recent York, together with Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-In poor health., and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., are amongst 144 current and former members of Congress who signed on to the temporary.
Ten consumer advocacy organizations also filed an amicus temporary with the Supreme Court this month in support of the CFPB.
The Supreme Court agreed to listen to arguments within the case in February, 4 months after a federal appeals court panel unanimously ruled that the CFPB’s funding method was unconstitutional.
Congress decided to fund the CFPB, which was created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act after the 2008 financial crisis, from the Federal Reserve out of “needed independence from unpredictable annual funding cycles,” in accordance with the temporary.
Though the CFPB bypasses the annual appropriations process, its director is required to justify its budget to the House biannually, the lawmakers wrote, and Congress set an annual cap on the agency’s budget at a “modest” level using a portion of Federal Reserve earnings.
Within the October ruling, Judge Cory Wilson, a member of the three-judge panel on the fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, called the funding mechanism a “scheme” that’s “unique across the myriad independent executive agencies across the federal government.”
The Biden administration appealed the fifth Circuit’s decision to the Supreme Court, but a final decision might be delayed until June 2024 to listen to other arguments within the case. Within the temporary, lawmakers concluded succinctly that “The judgment needs to be reversed.”
