Noah Feldman, Columnist

The Supreme Court’s CFPB Ruling Saved the Fed, Too

Even conservative Justice Thomas doesn’t want to undermine the global financial system. The same can’t be said for Justice Alito.

May 21, 2024 at 10:00 AM UTC

By Noah Feldman

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

A come-what-may originalist
Photographer: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

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Some may have been surprised that the conservative US Supreme Court would uphold the constitutionality of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, a bugbear of conservatives since it was created in 2010 in the wake of the financial crisis. But the argument in the case — that the CFPB’s funding mechanism violated the appropriations clause of the Constitution — was notably weak. And striking it down would have raised the specter of an attack on the constitutionality of the Federal Reserve itself — a prospect that happily remains unthinkable to a majority of the court’s conservatives.

Conservative challengers to the CFPB have had success in the Supreme Court before. In 2020, in a case called Seila Law, the court struck down the way Congress protected the leadership of the CFPB from being fired by a hostile president. The court made new law in holding that this form independence violated the president’s executive power.