John Roberts Is Following Corporate America's Long-Term Plan
John Roberts Is Following Corporate America’s Long-Term Plan
https://billmoyers.com/story/john-roberts-is-following-corporate-americas-long-term-plan/
When Roberts was nominated in ’05, few focused on his business fealty, but he was appointed because he represented corporate clients aiming to transform the court — which is exactly what he’s doing.
This week, the Supreme Court dutifully handed another victory to the US Chamber of Commerce, siding with the corporate lobbying group by invalidating the law that protected one of the nation’s chief financial regulators from White House meddling. It was another step towards making the Roberts Court the most corporate-compliant judicial body in modern American history.
In the ruling, the court struck down provisions that said a president could only fire the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for cause. The decision did preserve the agency’s right to exist, but as dissenting Justice Elana Kagan put it, the ruling “wipes out a feature of that agency its creators thought fundamental to its mission — a measure of independence from political pressure.”
Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren put it more bluntly, saying the Roberts Court “just handed over more power to Wall Street’s army of lawyers and lobbyists to push out a director who fights for the American people.”
The result is a hypocritical standard that favors the financial industry: a corporate president can instantly fire a CFPB chairman who assesses fines against Wall Street conglomerates that bankroll his political machine, but a future progressive president is still barred from firing a Federal Reserve chairman who doles out hundreds of billions of dollars of bailouts to corporations.
The CFPB ruling exemplifies the court’s sharp shift to right — a shift that relatively few even know about because media headlines about the court typically focus on social issues.
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