Pro-business Supreme Court shouldn't defang Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

The Supreme Court hears a case Tuesday about whether the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's structure as an independent agency with a single director is unconstitutional. That may seem like a narrow and technical issue, but it raises the fundamental question before us in the 2020 election: can we make our government work for the people?

In 2007, I came up with the idea for the CFPB — a new federal agency dedicated to protecting families from predatory financial products and holding financial firms accountable for cheating consumers. I had spent years studying how Wall Street banks and other financial predators were loading up mortgages, credit card contracts, and other financial documents with tricks and traps designed to cheat families. Those predatory mortgages set the stage for the financial crisis and recession that followed, costing millions of Americans their homes, their jobs, and their savings.

Federal regulators had most of the tools they needed to stop this predatory behavior but they didn’t use them. They often did the opposite — actively opposing attempts by states to protect consumers from these practices. Why did they fail? Simple. They were captured by the banking industry they were supposed to regulate. I wasn’t in politics after the 2008 crisis hit, but when Congress got involved to reform the financial sector, I saw my chance to end this corrupt, captured regulatory system, and I pushed hard to make the CFPB a reality.