Tim Ryan reports—Justices Will Hear Challenge to Consumer Watchdog Agency:
Taking up a case that will give its conservative majority another opportunity to press their vision of administrative agency power, the Supreme Court agreed Friday to hear an existential challenge to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
A subdivision of the Federal Reserve since 2010, the bureau must defend its creation under the Dodd-Frank Act as part of a court case with Seila Law, a Kansas-based firm that has been bucking the bureau’s investigative requests.
Seila, which represents consumers facing debt, says it did not have to comply with the requests because the bureau’s structure is unconstitutional.
When a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit disagreed in May, Seila petitioned the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari. The justices granted that writ Friday, without comment, as is their custom.
The CFPB, as the bureau is more commonly known, was the brainchild of Senator Elizabeth Warren, who at the time was a professor at Harvard. [...]
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“If by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people-their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties-someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal", then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal.”
~~John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage (1955)
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2018—Did Betsy DeVos work with pro-gun groups in effort to put guns in schools? We'll soon find out:
Back in August, the Betsy DeVos-led Department of Education announced that the nation's schools should be able to buy guns using federal grant money. This was not, despite DeVos' earlier contributions to our national discourse on the subject, so that schools could ward off marauding bears; it was so school officers could be provided guns to shoot at human school intruders, part of the endless demands by the National Rifle Association and other proto-militia groups to introduce guns into every aspect of American society under the general banner of "let he who has the most bullets win."
It's not clear yet whether this decision is even legal, but whether it is or it isn't the American Federation of Teachers, the Giffords Law Center, and the SPLC are now suing the Department of Education to force DeVos to reveal whether the NRA or other gun groups worked with the Department of Education to come to that rather creative decision.
“The information sought by Plaintiffs’ FOIA requests, which will shed light on whether lobbyists associated with the firearms industry or gun-lobby groups including the National Rifle Association were involved in the Department’s decision and reveal communications between the Department and states or local school districts and within the Department concerning the use of these funds to arm teachers, is plainly of great public importance,” says the lawsuit.
Schools can't afford textbooks, notebook paper, or other basic supplies, but by God we're going to make sure teachers can properly kill someone who needs killing. That's where we are these days.