Daily Herald opinion: Supreme Court’s ruling on consumer agency shows it can rise beyond politics

The good news on the government front last week wasn’t just that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the watchdog agency Congress created to try to avoid another 2008 financial disaster. It was also how it did so.

By a 7-2 vote.

And, the good news there isn’t just that the margin is overwhelming. It’s that it does not follow the strict conservative vs. liberal plot lines we’ve come to expect from an increasingly politicized court.

Indeed, the court’s ruling last Thursday was written by one of the conservative justices one might expect to be most inclined to carve out a political loophole that would eliminate an arm of the federal government, Clarence Thomas.

But, no, this time, Thomas and the court majority stood on the side of the law, not politics.

Opponents had argued that because the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is funded by profits from the Federal Reserve rather than a specific appropriation from Congress, a practice created to strengthen the agency’s political independence, it violates a constitutional requirement that Congress oversee federal spending.

The Supreme Court majority was not swayed.

“Under the Appropriations Clause, an appropriation is simply a law that authorizes expenditures from a specified source of public money for designated purposes,” Thomas wrote. “The statute that provides the Bureau’s funding meets these requirements. We therefore conclude that the Bureau’s funding mechanism does not violate the Appropriations Clause.”

There is certainly still room to question the need for the CFPB or the length of its reach. While the agency is credited with returning some $20 billion to consumers through rulings on business or industry misbehavior, it does have broad powers that need to be monitored and managed.

But as the court affirmed, its existence and its mandates are political matters, subject to the will of the people’s elected representatives. That much is as it should be.

One must be cautious about celebrating any act from the court, especially this court, as a display of political distance. The degree of seeming partisan influence in the thinking of individual justices of all stripes on the court is still disquieting and not necessarily diminished by a single ruling.

But it should not go without notice that the court has shown — or at least that its traditionally conservative members have shown, since all the liberal justices sided with the majority — that it can set aside personal political inclinations on a matter of significant impact and high political controversy.

That is not an insignificant act. If more like it come to pass in the future, perhaps the court can begin to demonstrate the kind of commitment to the law and the Constitution that is needed to restore the nation’s faith in its key institutions of government.