Last month, President Trump and Congress took an unprecedented step against bureaucratic overreach. They used the Congressional Review Act to eliminate one of the many thousands of edicts that federal agencies impose on Americans each year without public participation or judicial supervision. The edict in question was a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau “bulletin” that threatened to punish certain financial institutions unless they imposed controls on the interest rates offered by auto dealers.

The CFPB’s rationale was that the interest rates offered by auto dealers were discriminatory. But then, why not directly regulate the auto dealers themselves?