U.S. Senator Richard Shelby, ranking Republican on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, today made the following statement on the Senate floor on his decision to oppose a procedural motion regarding the nomination of Richard Cordray to lead the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (BCFP). Senator Shelby was joined by 44 of his Republican colleagues in writing a letter to President Obama vowing that they will not consider any nominee to head up the Bureau until three commonsense, substantive changes are made to the Bureau’s structure in order to make it accountable to the American taxpayers. Republican leadership has received no correspondence from the White House on this matter.
Excerpts of Shelby’s statement are immediately below in bold, followed by the full text of his prepared remarks:
“It should be common sense that the more power an agency has the more accountable it needs to be.
“Rather than attempting to point to other regulators to justify the structure of the Bureau, a more responsible approach would be to make all of our financial regulators more accountable. And we should begin with the Bureau.
“To make the Bureau more accountable, we have proposed three common-sense reforms…the Bureau should be led by a Board of Directors…the Bureau’s funding should be subject to Congressional appropriations…our third reform is to create an effective safety and soundness check for the prudential bank regulators.
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“Recent history shows that taxpayers are ultimately on the hook for bank failures. For this reason, consumer protection needs to be carefully coordinated with bank regulation to prevent against unnecessary bank failures.
“In light of the reasonableness of the reforms we have requested, the question remains: why are the Administration and the Majority so insistent that the Bureau be unaccountable? Clearly, they want to use the Bureau as a political issue.
“Nominees are held routinely in the Senate by both parties for any number of reasons including the desire to make changes in existing law. The only thing different in this particular case is that it is completely transparent. No secret backroom deals.
“Mr. President, after all the harm caused to consumers by financial regulators, it is time that the Majority stop using consumer protection as a political football and start taking actions that actually help consumers.
“We can take the first step by reforming the Bureau to make it accountable to the very consumers it seeks to protect.
“Until that time, however, we cannot, should not, and will not move forward on the nomination of a Director to lead this massive and unaccountable bureaucracy.
“I urge my Democrat colleagues to stop obstructing reform and join with us to move forward on real consumer protection. (continued)
