Trump Judges Are Fighting About Whether to Crash the Economy
Back in October, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit issued a radical decision that has only grown more alarming in the months since: It declared the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unconstitutional in an opinion that seemed designed to destabilize America’s entire financial system. The 5th Circuit’s ruling would, experts say, send the economy into a tailspin, crashing the housing market and triggering a bank panic that would make the 2008 recession look like child’s play. And that’s just the start: Longer-term, the decision would open up financial regulators to partisan interference and subversion while threatening trillions of dollars in entitlement spending for programs like Medicare and Social Security.
The Supreme Court will review the 5th Circuit’s CFPB ruling next term to decide whether the federal judiciary should sabotage the economy. But a decision from SCOTUS is still more than a year away—a year of growing economic pain and uncertainty. In the meantime, banks are getting nervous, and Republicans are trying to exploit the uncertainty to defund and deregulate financial watchdogs.
So it is very good news that, on Thursday, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the CFPB’s constitutionality in its own review of the question, condemning the 5th Circuit decision as totally unmoored from logic, precedent, and constitutional text. There is a good chance that SCOTUS will consolidate the 2nd and 5th Circuit cases, hearing and deciding both at once. Even better news: The 2nd Circuit decision was written by Judge Richard J. Sullivan, a Donald Trump appointee and Federalist Society member whose opinion should carry real weight at this Supreme Court. As fears of a recession grow, it is ever more vital for judges like Sullivan to affirm the judiciary will not provoke or exacerbate any looming crisis.
To see why Sullivan’s opinion is so important, look first at the 5th Circuit’s rash and incoherent decision. The 5th decision was written by a Trump appointee, Judge Cory Wilson, and joined by two other Trump appointees, Judges Kurt D. Engelhardt and Don Willett. Wilson took aim at a feature of the CFPB that has long frustrated conservatives: its independence. Created as part of the Dodd–Frank Act in 2010, the agency was designed to protect consumers against fraud and exploitation in consumer loans, home mortgages, credit cards, and retail banking. Congress safeguarded its independence by preventing the president from firing its director and securing its funding through the Federal Reserve. The Supreme Court struck down this first feature in 2020. But today, the CFPB continues to draw funds from the Federal Reserve, which is, in turn, chiefly funded by interest it earns on securities.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/trump-judges-are-fighting-about-whether-to-crash-the-economy/ar-AA190lkn
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no doubt about it. A "backwards revolution."
I'm packing to move and applying for a visa to emigrate. Every time I start looking at real estate listings in the U.S. and think it wouldn't be so bad to stay here, something like this story surfaces and I realize it's only going to get worse. Even if the radicals don't prevail here, they will elsewhere and cumulatively, I think we won't recognize this country in a decade or so.
