Who is the duly elected president of the United States, former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau boss Richard Cordray or Donald Trump?
If your name is Leandra English, then in your psychotic fantasy President Cordray named you as acting director of the CFPB, a loathsome federal agency created to persecute businesses.
English filed suit against the Trump administration in federal court Sunday claiming that departing CFPB chief Cordray appointed her as interim director of the bureau on the way out. Sounds kind of like a landmark, well, the landmark Supreme Court case, Marbury v. Madison from 1803, doesn’t it? William Marbury was an aggrieved office-seeker. President John Adams filled out the commission for Marbury’s appointment as a justice of the peace in the District of Columbia but failed to deliver it before leaving office. President Thomas Jefferson didn’t act on the commission, nor could he have been compelled to act. Marbury was out of luck.
The actual president, Donald Trump, doesn’t want English in charge of the CFPB. He has appointed Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Mick Mulvaney as acting CFPB director.
President Trump doesn’t need to wait for the courts to rule on the ultra-frivolous lawsuit brought by a self-important bureaucrat who refuses to recognize him as the head of the Executive Branch.
The courts have no place in this dispute. The president on his own constitutional authority should direct the U.S. Marshals Service or any law enforcement officials to immediately, forcibly remove this pretender from the premises of the CFPB, should she show up at the office and claim she is running the joint. She should also be unceremoniously fired, regardless of what transpires at the office.
It is time for the Trump administration to start showing saboteurs the door.
This item first appeared at Bombthrowers on Nov. 27, 2017.