Morning Bell: The Obama Experts vs. the Rule of Law

Conn Carroll / October 04, 2010

Last week President Barack Obama’s most recently minted czar, Special Advisor to the President for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Elizabeth Warren, spoke to 400 bankers at the swanky Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, DC. Her message, according to The Washington Post: “Behave, play nice, and we’ll get along just fine.” Specifically, Warren promised to take a more “principles-based approach” to regulation, rather than clearly articulating “thou shalt not” rules that banks could rely on. For this Progressive White House, an enlightened expert, like Warren, given broad new powers by an unaccountably vague statute is exactly what the federal government needs to enforce order on our complex modern world. For our Founding Fathers, however, everything about Warren, from the way she attained her new powers to the way she plans to use them, is antithetical to our nation’s First Principles and the United States Constitution.

Look again at Warren’s title. She is not the director of the CFPB nor does she even work for it. For her to actually head the agency, President Obama would have to submit her name to the Senate to meet the Constitution’s “advice and consent” requirement. But President Obama did not want that transparency. Instead he decided to subvert the Constitution by making her his “special advisor” that would lead a team of “about 30 or 40 people at the Department of Treasury” to set up the CFPB. Yale Constitutional law professor Bruce Ackerman described Obama’s Warren chicanery as “another milestone down the path toward an imperial presidency.”

But Warren’s appointment is just the beginning of her assault on the Constitution. Her rejection of rules-based governing, cited above, is also a rejection of our nation’s First Principles. Hillsdale College Ronald Pestritto explains: (more…)