Steve Benen points out today that Ted Cruz wants to eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau because it “does little to protect consumers.” Ironically, this comes on the same day that the CFPB won a case against Citibank for deceptive practices that resulted in a $700 million fine. But 
irony is not a Republican strong suit, and most of them not only want to eliminate the CFPB, they want to eliminate all of Dodd-Frank while they’re at it.
This is not a big surprise since (a) Republicans have hated Dodd-Frank all along and virtually all of them voted against it, (b) it’s an Obama thing, nuff said, and (c) it forces big banks to treat consumers fairly, and Republicans don’t like laws that force big banks—or any other big business—to treat consumers fairly. Benen comments:
If the Dodd/Frank were actually imposing unreasonable burdens on well intentioned financial institutions, the complaints might be worth considering, but the fact remains that Wall Street reform is an under-appreciated success story. The repeal crusade is misguided on political and policy grounds.
This actually brings up a point worth repeating: one of the prices we pay for extreme political polarization is the inability to tweak big laws after they’re passed. No Democrat would claim that Obamacare is perfect, for example. With a few years of experience under our belts, there are some things we now recognize could have been done better. But it’s impossible to tweak the law because Republicans flatly refuse to cooperate. It’s repeal or nothing. To their base, tweaking the law would be a tacit admission that Obamacare can be improved, and that’s effectively treason to the cause. It’s a socialist nightmare and it has to be torn out root and branch, period.
The same dynamic is true of Dodd-Frank. You can make a good case, for example, that the Dodd-Frank rules pose an unnecessary burden on small community banks that are obviously no threat to the financial system. But even if Democrats would now be willing to loosen the compliance requirements for banks under a certain size, there’s no way to make it happen. It’s a tweak to the law, and supporting that tweak merely helps Dodd-Frank stay on the books. Better to keep the law as crappy as possible so that opposition to it stays as strong as possible.
We see this play out over and over. Modern legislation is inherently complex and needs to be periodically tweaked to keep it working properly. When you can’t do that, it steadily gums up the works and keeps everyone in a seething fury about how incompetent the federal government is.
Which is the whole point, of course. Welcome to the modern Republican Party. The more they can make a hash out of government operations, the better off they are.
