Richard Cordray, the former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said Monday the fight over his successor shouldn’t descend into “name calling or partisan bickering,” as a legal battle over the position looms.
“It’s a serious legal matter, you have conflicting laws, it’s the kind of thing that should be weighed carefully, and the judge is weighing it carefully,” Cordray told CNN. “It shouldn’t be the object of name calling or partisan bickering.”
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act allows a CFPB director to appoint a deputy head as acting director, but Cordray said “there’s also another more general law that provides for succession if there’s no specific provision.”
Cordray suggested the aim of legal action against the Trump administration was to push for a nominee that was less recalcitrant toward the financial sector watchdog than President Trump’s interim pick, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney.
He added the Senate confirmation process could be protracted, reflecting on how it took him two years to be approved by the upper chamber.
“The fact that consumers deserve to have somebody looking out for them, somebody seeing that people are playing fair, that the rules are being enforced evenly, so that the bad players can’t crowd out the good players, that’s an important thing in our society, that’s the way markets work, that’s how people are protected and benefited,” Cordray said. “And that’s what we stood up for at that agency.”
