The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday denied a request from 27 Republican attorneys general to participate in oral arguments in a case on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s funding.
In an unsigned order Monday, the high court did not explain its reasons for rejecting the bid to divide oral arguments in a case brought against the CFPB by the Community Financial Services Association, a payday lending trade group that asserted the bureau’s funding is unconstitutional.
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey and 26 other AGs argued last month that their background in consumer protection issues gives them a “special understanding of how an unbounded CFPB can damage the consumer-financial markets — and impair the States’ own abilities to regulate those markets,” according to a petition seen by Bloomberg Law.
The Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments Oct. 3 in the CFPB’s appeal of a ruling last October by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which asserted that the agency’s funding apparatus violates the Constitution’s separation-of-powers principle because the money comes from the Federal Reserve, not Congress.
Bloomberg Law couldn’t immediately reach Morrisey for comment.
Attorneys general from Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming also signed on to the July petition.
