December 12, 2018 12:50 PM UTC

Cory Gardner's Latest Hit: What Consumer Financial Protection?

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• by: Colorado Pols

NPR reported last week on the vote in the U.S. Senate to confirm Kathy Kraninger as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an agency that has suffered from severe and very deliberate neglect under President Donald Trump:

The Senate voted 50-49 Thursday to back Kraninger as head of the consumer protection watchdog agency. She has worked for the Office of Management and Budget since March 2017.

She will succeed her OMB boss Mick Mulvaney, who has been the CFPB’s acting director, for a five-year term. An associate director for general government at the OMB, Kraninger, 43, held prior jobs at the departments of Homeland Security and Transportation.

Kraninger’s appointment is another slight by the Trump administration against the CFPB, an agency Mulvaney has worked to weaken from within.

Vox provides a little more background on the years-long partisan fight over the CFPB, and how the leadership of the bureau turned downright hostile to its mission under Trump:

The CFPB was created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform and formed in 2011. Its mission is to protect consumers who are dealing with banks and taking on debt, including mortgages, student loans, and credit cards. Under its first director, Cordray, who was confirmed in 2013, the bureau by its own tally handled more than 1.2 million consumer complaints and brought about nearly $12 billion in relief for harmed consumers…

Under Mulvaney, who once called the bureau as “sick, sad” joke, the CFPB took a sharp turn in its activities. Mulvaney reportedly scaled back an investigation into the Equifax data breach, relaxed restrictions on often predatory payday lenders, and recommended Congress pursue sweeping changes to the CFPB’s powers.

Kraninger doesn’t have much of a track record for Senators to have evaluated during her confirmation, but by all accounts she is expected to continue Trump multipurpose henchman Mick Mulvaney’s willful mismanagement of the CFPB to relax oversight over lenders and credit reporting agencies. Affirmatively speaking, Kraninger had nothing to offer in this position–her confirmation was strictly based on the administration’s desire for her to have the job, and the unifying Republican contempt for this agency and the legislation that created it told Republican Senators all they needed to know.

For Sen. Cory Gardner, whose vote to confirm Kraninger was decisive like every other GOP Senator, this was a continuation of an already dismal record on consumer finance issues that he’ll be made to answer for in 2020. For Gardner in particular, consistently voting to protect loan sharks over consumers puts him in direct conflict with Colorado voters, who just approved Proposition 111 to cap interest rates on predatory payday loans by over 77% of the vote.

It may not have the drama of an issue like abortion, but this could easily be another big liability for Gardner in 2020 if it becomes a major point of debate–for example, in the event longtime CFPB proponent Elizabeth Warren is on the 2020 ticket for Democrats.

And if there’s one thing Cory Gardner doesn’t need, it’s more liabilities.