Jim Purcell, chairman and CEO of the State National Bank of Big Spring, says that the Dodd-Frank Act’s creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau “violate[s] a bedrock rule of law: the Constitution’s separation of powers, which the Founders designed specifically to limit the growth of government.”
Purcell stated as much in an editorial piece for the Wall Street Journal, co-written with C. Boyden Gray, former White House counsel for President George H.W. Bush. Gray is representing Purcell’s bank in State National Bank of Big Spring v. Geithner, filed in federal court last week to challenge Dodd-Frank’s constitutionality.
The authors say the CFPB currently operates in a way that prevents it from having to answer to any other branch of the federal government. By drawing resources from the budget of the Federal Reserve, what James Madison called Congress’ “power of the purse” is neutralized; the terms under which the President can remove the CFPB director from his position are “strictly limited,” the authors say; and the law that established the CFPB “limits the courts’ review” of the financial bureau’s activities.
“It is one thing for Congress to eliminate just one check or balance, but it is quite another to eliminate virtually all of them at once,” the column reads.
Read the full editorial here.
