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Comment by 0n0n0m0uz | Hacker News Reader

Mistake for who? The gutting of the consumer protection served the function and constituency it was designed to.

The rule was overturned by a federal court for overstepping the DOL’s statutory authority. What “constituency” are those unelected, life-tenured judges serving, exactly?

Maybe the rule is a good idea, or maybe it isn’t. But the Obama administration tried to promulgate a massive new financial regulation through aggressive interpretation of existing statutory authority. A federal court didn’t buy it. That sometimes happens when you try to create new laws through executive bureaucracy rather than Congress. (Ironically, exactly the same thing has repeatedly happened to Trump.)

The Trump adminstration has abandoned the fiduciary rule by not appealing the federal court's ruling.

And Congress has abandoned the fiduciary rule by deciding not to pass a new bill that would be acceptable to the courts.

The government won at trial, defended the win on appeal, and lost. There is no “appeal” from that. The decision of the court of appeals typically is the final word. The only avenues are petitions for discretionary review, reserved for special cases: rehearing (asking the appeals court to change its mind), or Supreme Court review. Such review is rarely granted (a few percent of cases), and generally only for a question of exceptional importance to the law, or where different courts of appeals reach conflicting decisions. Neither was true here.

It was overturned in court because the current administration refused to defend it.

It’s possible that even if they had genuinely defended the rule in court it would have been overturned, but that’s not what happened and while technically you are right, in reality, the decision was a political and not a judicial decision.

That is absolutely false. You can hear the hour long argument where the government defended the rule here: http://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/OralArgRecordings/17/17-10238_7-.... The Fifth Circuit then rendered a decision on the merits. The government didn’t file for rehearing or petition for Supreme Court review. But those are discretionary forms of review, reserved for special circumstances, and rarely result in overturning the appeals court decision.

CFPB was also part of the handiwork of a true "enemy" of decent people-who-for-a-living in the United States, namely Mr. Mick Mulvaney.

The current "interim" (wink wink) chief of staff at the White House which on its face is absolutely horrifying for a superpower but that's another issue for another day

Pardon the businessinsider, this article summarizes pretty well Mr. Mulvaney's extracurricular activities there : https://static1.businessinsider.com/mick-mulvaney-turned-the...

To be clear, you can have a good faith disagreement about how responsible people should be or how much government regulation you like but in this case specifically, this isn't a gee-golly difference of opinion on the scope/reach of government. Just speaking personally, I don't much want any gov regulation or intervention anywhere-- especially these days with who is charge-- but it was sure nice for about 15 minutes for there to be a public institution that provided some assurance that scumbag financial institutions who provably & very much regularly screwed over "little people" in little ways could be held to account in some measure.

For the guv'mint is too big crowd, the CFPB was the agency which help expose Wells Fargo bank’s fake account scams. (If unfamiliar, these are some of the gory details: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/09/08/w...)

Another meat-and-potatoes example: pre-paid credit cards (a $65 billion industry in 2012 according to Pew.)

Before the CFPB, prepaid credit card offers were dense and confusing legal documents , but this is what those offers must look like now: https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/wp-content/uplo...

They've even has a catchy line: “know before you owe!”

Regular are getting hurt and when the next crisis comes we're going in a worse position to the efforts of these ridiculous characters like Mr. Mulvaney

This.

The article makes the assumption that the law was intended to help the masses. I'm just not certain that's the case in reality.

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