PrairiePundit

NY Times: In France, Dying at Home Can Mean a Long Wait for a Doctor It is illegal in France to move a body without a death certificate, which only a doctor can sign. But a doctor can be hard to find. This is the bureaucratic nonsense that comes along with government healthcare.

Washington Examiner: After watching Mick Mulvaney spar with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., in recent days, it’s tempting to make the modest proposal that President Trump nominate Mulvaney for every administration position that has to testify before Sens. Warren, Cory Booker, D-N.J., Kamala Harris, D-Calif., Chris Murphy, D-Conn., or any of the other senators running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Mulvaney has earned Warren’s ire because he is the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was her brainchild. While she hasn’t backed down in their colorful exchanges, Mulvaney has been winning on points. When the senator lobbed the tired accusation that Mulvaney was forgoing stricter regulations because payday lenders had bought the GOP, (for the record, the payday industry spends about half as much on politics as, say, the abortion lobby ) Mulvaney responded wryly: “Prior to receiving your letter, I never would have thought to consider, for i...

Washington Post: Senate prepares to roll back banking rules, with red-state Democrats voicing support More than a dozen Democrats in the Senate, some of whom face tough midterm election contests, are ready to give Republicans the votes they need to weaken the Dodd-Frank regulations passed after the 2008 financial crisis. The move would sap one of former president Barack Obama’s largest legislative achievements. Dodd-Frank was part of a Democrat coverup for measures imposed on banks and financial institutions by Democrats.  They forced lenders to make bad loans and then tried to hide those loans in government financial instruments which wound up tainting good loans anding to the financial debacle.  While the Bush administration could have done more to stop the mess created by the Democrats it was their policies that caused the problem. Dodd-Frank was a blatant attempt to blame the banks for Democrat policy failures.

Paul Sperry: President Trump’s executive orders slashing onerous Obama-era regulations on industry have been credited with kick-starting the sluggish economy and rocket-boosting the stock market. But there’s one mountain of red tape that’s eluded his machete — the Obama-created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Until now. ... Industry analysts say unduly harsh regulations and unreasonable penalties have driven thousands of banks out of business, denying many areas access to credit. To appease CFPB’s army of regulators, they say, some banks for the first time have had to hire more compliance officers than loan officers — and they, in turn, have to pass those compliance costs on to customers in the form of higher fees and finance charges. ... They say CFPB is a Democrat shop with an anti-business agenda that goes well beyond protecting consumers and includes closing the “wealth gap” and administering “economic justice,” as Cordray has been fond of saying. It hires almost exclus...

Washington Examiner: The ongoing fight for control of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau may have significant effects on the bureau's mass acquisition of private financial records, according to privacy advocates. The CFPB pools vast quantities of data for research purposes, including millions of Americans’ credit card records, which it says are anonymized, commercially available and tracked to help consumers, not to spy on them. Critics doubt the adequacy of safeguards, however, and liken the credit data-collection to the National Security Agency’s monitoring of internet and phone records under laws that allow tracking of spies and terrorists. Mick Mulvaney, who assumed command of the CFPB on Monday morning, has been broadly critical of the independent agency as a “rogue" organization. ... Calabria testified to Congress in 2015 that the CFPB’s collection, “particularly in the area of credit cards, poses significant threats to our Fourth Amendment protections.” ...

Washington Examiner: The Obama-era Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under fire by the Trump administration has been a Democratic Party donor bank, its bureaucrats writing checks to liberals at a rate of 593 to one Republican. Research of donor records on the OpenSecrets website maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics revealed that Hillary Rodham Clinton was the dominant recipient of tens of thousands of dollars from CFPB workers, followed by President Obama and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who had a huge role in creating the agency. A quick count of donations found: $46,611 to Hillary Rodham Clinton. $13,190 to Sen Elizabeth Warren. $19,988 to President Obama. $10,075 to Democratic campaign committees. $1,129 to Sen. Bernie Sanders. Of the 594 donor entries who listed the agency as their employer, one went to Mitt Romney, the losing 2012 Republican presidential nominee. It was for $1,000. Several other Democratic lawmakers also received donations from CFPB staff. Over...

Mike Hunter: Lord Acton once said that "power tends to corrupt…and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Nowhere is this truer today than at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB is the quintessential example of what happens when accountability to Congress and the president is removed—when there are no checks and balances on the power of an unelected bureaucrat. Created as a part of the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010, the CFPB wields immense, unbridled power over consumers and businesses, dictating the circumstances in which people have access to basic banking, student loans, home financing, credit cards, and a host of other financial services. All of this power resides in one person: CFPB Director Richard Cordray, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama. Cordray answers to no one. Although Cordray has exercised his vast, hyper-paternalistic authority in a manner that has limited consumer choice and shuttered community banks, the president cannot fire h...

NY Times: Bill to Erase Some Dodd-Frank Banking Rules Passes in House Republicans have vowed to dismantle legislation enacted in the wake of the financial crisis, but their Choice Act faces a tougher fight in the Senate. Hillary Clinton described Dodd-Frank to the bankers paying her handsomely for a few minute speeches as mainly politics.  It was one of her more honest statements in a career of saying things that were not so. What the Democrats were trying to do was shift blame for the financial crisis from their own bad policies which caused the housing debacle to the banks who they forced to make bad loans to people who would not have been qualified for the loans under normal circumstances.  When those loans eventually turned bad they had a cascading effect on the housing market making many good loans bad as the housing prices went into a death spiral in several communities. Dodd-Frank was one of the biggest cover-ups in history.  It wound up helping the t...

NY Times: House Foe of Dodd-Frank Says Overhaul Will Face Test in Senate Representative Jeb Hensarling, chairman of the Financial Services Committee, said he would work on a “2.0 version” of financial reform legislation to attract Senate Democrats. Dodd-Frank was always a political distraction from the Democrats' responsibility for the housing crisis.  Rather than admit that their policy of encouraging people with poor credit to buy houses and the pressure they put on lenders to make bad loans, the Democrats decided to blame the banks who were the biggest losers in their scam.  As is typical with this kind of heavy-handed regulations it hurt the small banks more than the big banks. One of the tidbits of information coming from Wikileaks involved Hillary Clinton's admission that Dodd-Frank was a political move.  That little bit of honesty was something she tried to hide from the voters.  It is just another example of how Democrats never take responsibility for ...

NY Times: Jeb Hensarling Plan Rekindles Debate as Republicans Aim to Dismantle Dodd-Frank Eight years after the financial crisis, easing the oversight of big banks is still on the agenda for some Republicans. The Dodd-Frank law was part of a massive cover up by Democrats of their own responsibility for the financial crisis. They caused the housing debacle by using the Community Reinvestment Act and other levers of government to force banks and otehr lenders to make loans to unqualified borrowers who subsequently defaulted.  Those defaults had a cascading effect on the value of homes and led even more substantive borrowers into default. To cover up the debacle Dodd and Frank who were some of the chief proponents of the Democrat policy concocted a scheme to blame the financial institutions they had coerced into making the loans.  Many of the institutions they targeted were some of the biggest victims of their original scheme losing millions in the process.  Along wit...

Jeb Hensarling: ... Dodd-Frank was based on the premise that the financial crisis was the result of deregulation. Yet George Mason University’s Mercatus Center reports that regulatory restrictions on financial services grew every year between 1999-2008. It wasn’t deregulation that caused the crisis, it was dumb regulation. Among the dumbest were Washington’s affordable-housing mandates, beginning in 1977, that led to a loosening of underwriting standards and put people into homes they couldn’t afford. The Federal Reserve played its part in the 2008 financial crisis by keeping interest rates too low for too long, inflating the housing bubble. Washington not only failed to prevent the crisis, it led us into it. Dodd-Frank was supposedly aimed at Wall Street, but it hit Main Street hard. Community financial institutions, which make the bulk of small business loans, are overwhelmed by the law’s complexity. Government figures indicate that the country is losing on average one commu...

IBD: Subprime Scandal: We've long suspected the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission wasn't honest in examining events before the meltdown. But an ex-commissioner says the probe was actually a full-blown political cover-up. In a just-released book, former FCIC member Peter Wallison says that a Democratic Congress worked with the commission's Democratic chairman to whitewash the government's central role in the mortgage debacle. The conspiracy helped protect some of the Democrats' biggest stars from scrutiny and accountability while helping justify the biggest government takeover of the financial sector since the New Deal. Wallison's sobering, trenchantly written "Hidden in Plain Sight: What Really Caused the World's Worst Financial Crisis and Why It Could Happen Again" reveals that the Democrat-led panel buried key data proving that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and other federal agencies pushed the housing market over the s...

Peter Wallison: The illegitimate Dodd-Frank law has nothing to do with the financial crisis The fact of the law should be a scandal.  It was written as a cover up for Democrat housing policies which caused the financial debacle to begin with.

NY Times: In New Congress, Wall St. Pushes to Undermine Reform The continuing assault on the 2010 Dodd-Frank law has achieved remarkable success, especially compared with the repeated failures of opponents of another 2010 law, the Affordable Care Act. Both of these laws were abominations. The healthcare law has mainly survived because of Democrat manipulation of the process and not because it is popular.  Dodd Frank was designed to transfer responsibility for the housing and financial crisis created by the disastrous Democrat housing policy which forced bad loans on banks and then blamed them for making the loans.  Both laws should be repealed.

NY Times: Kicking Dodd-Frank in the Teeth New legislation, promoted as making only technical changes in a financial regulation law, could end up gutting some of its provisions. This law was part of a massive cover up by the Democrats to shift responsibility for the financial crisis to the banks who were victims of their policy of forcing them to loan money to people who could not afford to pay for their mortgage.  It was the Democratic policy that forced these questionable instruments into the banking system and nearly collapsed it, then the conspired to cover up their mess with Dodd-Frank and shakedown the banks in the process.   If there is anything good and worth saving in the colossal mess it is not obvious.

Washington Post: Warren leads liberal rebellion on spending bill Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other liberals complained that provisions in the $1.01 trillion bill would roll back critical limits on Wall Street and increase the influence of wealthy campaign donors. But hey, they will blame Ted Cruz and the Republicans.  They are already getting far more than they should in this deal, but greedy liberals just want more.  It is what they do when it comes to spending other people's money and exercising control freak regulations. The so called critical provisions are part of the awful Dodd-Frank law which was a massive coverup of Democrat complicity in the financial crisis where they tried to shift blame to the banks and financial institutions for polices they required. They should be ignored.

Washington Examiner Editorial: Officials with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are monitoring 80 percent of Americans' credit cards and 95 percent of their mortgages. The Department of Health and Human Services is collecting “social and behavioral” data for patients' health care records. These are the latest additions to the deeply personal information that federal bureaucrats have been empowered to access in recent years under programs initiated by President Obama. Intrusions into the privacy of individuals and families on this scale are without warrant for a government that is supposed to be limited. The CFPB, the ironically named entity created by the Dodd-Frank Act within the Federal Reserve, is conducting its intrusive activities through a data-mining program that Wisconsin Republican Rep. Sean Duffy described during a recent House Financial Services Committee hearing as a “step closer to a Big Brother form of government.” Bureau Director Richard Cordray  ...

Patrick Brennan: A Congressional Research Service report this week revealed that the Obama administration has missed precisely 50 percent of its deadlines in implementing Obamacare — and with the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law, they’re doing even worse. More than half of the law’s 279 deadlines so far — 61.6 percent — have been missed by July 15, according to a new report . The law firm DavisPolk has been publishing reports on Dodd-Frank’s progress for a while now, and they explain “the pace of rulemaking has been remarkably consistent over the past three years” — but it’s been consistently far behind the pace actually set by the law. Since the deadlines are dispersed, some months have been particularly rough — April 2011 saw regulators hit a serious cold streak, missing 26 deadlines that month. Dodd-Frank requires a variety of federal agencies — the SEC, the Fed, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, etc. — to actually write the new financial-market rules that Congress merel...

Conn Carroll: What could be worse the inflicting $46.2 billion in regulatory costs? If those regulations not only came in late but were also wrong. According to a new study by the American Action Forum, not only has the Obama administration missed nearly half of the regulatory deadlines in Obamacare, and 59 percent of the regulatory deadlines in the Dodd-Frank bill, but many of those initial regulatory announcement turned out to be wrong. To date, regulators implementing Dodd-Frank have been forced to issue 65 corrections to the 125 new regulations they created. The federal agencies implementing Obamacare have an even worse record, issuing 149 corrections to Obamacare’s 59 final rules. And while some of these errors are minor typos, many of them are big course corrections.... ... Combined, Dodd-Frank and Obamacare are expected to impose 135 million paperwork burden hours on the U.S. economy. Assuming a 2,000-hour work week, AAF estimates it would take more than 64,000 employees ...

Washington Free Beacon: Three states have joined a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. On Sept. 20, South Carolina, Michigan, and Oklahoma joined a lawsuit challenging the legality of the financial reform act. Their complaint argues that the “Orderly Liquidation Authority” granted to the Treasury Secretary under Title II of the act “violates the separation of powers.” In a conference call with reporters on Friday, Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma’s attorney general, said legislators used the 2008 financial crisis “to concentrate power in Washington, DC.” He argued that the bill is incompatible with the U.S. constitutional system and its framework of checks and balances. The lawsuit, he said, is about the “fundamental concept of making sure that our Constitutional framework is upheld.” The act gives the treasury secretary the power to liquidate financial institutions “with little or no advance warning, under cover of manda...