The Supreme Court’s CFPB Ruling Saved the Fed, Too: Noah Feldman

Some may have been surprised that the conservative US Supreme Court would uphold the constitutionality of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, a bugbear of conservatives since it was created in 2010 in the wake of the financial crisis. But the argument in the case — that the CFPB’s funding mechanism violated the appropriations clause of the Constitution — was notably weak. And striking it down would have raised the specter of an attack on the constitutionality of the Federal Reserve itself — a prospect that happily remains unthinkable to a majority of the court’s conservatives.

Conservative challengers to the CFPB have ...