April 25, 2018 11:35 AM UTC

Some Oversight of Mick Mulvaney, Scott Tipton?

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• by: Colorado Pols

CNN Chris Cillizza reports and it’s not a good look for President Donald Trump’s controversial all-things-finance czar Mick Mulvaney, whose fox-in-henhouse management of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is once again in the spotlight after this amazing moment of on-camera truthfulness Tuesday:

Donald Trump famously pledged to “drain the swamp” of Washington if elected president, getting rid of all the career politicians and lobbyists who buy and sell access and screw the little guy in the process.

Fifteen-ish months into Trump’s presidency, the swamp hasn’t been drained just yet. In fact, you could argue it’s swampier than ever.

Witness these comments by Mick Mulvaney, the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in a speech to banking executives on Tuesday (bolding is mine):

“What you do here matters. We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress. If you were a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you were a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you. If you came from back home and sat in my lobby, I talked to you without exception regardless of the financial contributions.”

As the New York Times’ Glenn Thrush adds, that policy appears to be the rule in Mulvaney’s new office too:

[Mulvaney] has frozen all new investigations and slowed down existing inquiries by requiring employees to produce detailed justifications. He also sharply restricted the bureau’s access to bank data, arguing that its investigations created online security risks. And he has scaled back efforts to go after payday lenders, auto lenders and other financial services companies accused of preying on the vulnerable.

But he wants Congress to go further and has urged it to wrest funding of the independent watchdog from the Federal Reserve, a move that would give lawmakers — and those with access to them — more influence on the bureau’s actions. On Tuesday, he implored the financial services industry to help support the legislative changes he has requested.

As Mick Mulvaney’s troubling actions to weaken the organization he is nominally in charge of align with rhetoric overtly suggesting that lobbyists who ‘give him money’ are the people he talks to, Coloradans looking for answers should contact GOP Rep. Scott Tipton of Cortez. He doesn’t get much attention for it, but Rep. Tipton currently serves as the vice chair of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the House Financial Services Committee–putting Tipton directly in an oversight role over Mulvaney’s activities. Given the frequency with which Mulvaney is making the news, the silence of Tipton’s committee is worth questioning to say the least.

Of course the fact that you haven’t heard from Tipton, with Mulvaney’s dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau already well underway, could tell the struggling debtors of CD-3 everything they need to know.