DERRY, N.H. – The most entertaining comment so far on the Richard Cordray recess appointment comes from Mitt Romney. It’s a tiny epic of press release-ese, and to make this point I will bold the words that are supposed to tingle the fear centers of your brain.
President Obama’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is perhaps the most powerful and unaccountable bureaucracy in the history of our nation, headed by a powerful and unaccountable bureaucrat with unprecedented authority over the economy. Instead of working with Congress to fix the flaws in this new bureaucracy, the President is declaring that he ‘refuses to take no for an answer’ and circumventing Congress to appoint a new administrator. This action represents Chicago-style politics at its worst and is precisely what then-Senator Obama claimed would be ‘the wrong thing to do.’ Sadly, instead of focusing on economic growth, he is once again focusing on creating more regulation, more government, and more Washington gridlock.
The last part of this is incoherent: Running a play past Congress to appoint someone is gridlock? The “Chicago-style” reference is nice, though, reminding us of that exchange from The Untouchables: “He pulls a knife, you wait several months, replace a nominee who’s been threatened with a filibuster, wait a few months, get the new nominee filibustered, then give the nominee a short-term recess appointment.”
