THAT AUTO MAKE ‘EM THINK: The Senate voted 51-47 (with Sen. Manchin of West Virginia siding with the GOP) today to disapprove CFPB action restricting auto loan financing practices. This is important for several reasons. First, the action circumvented notice-and-comment, being a guidance document rather than a rule. Secondly, the CFPB was forbidden from regulating auto loans by the Dodd-Frank Act that created the CFPB. Thirdly, the guidance was several years old, which normally means that the Congressional Review Act doesn’t apply. In this case, however, the CFPB never bothered to submit the guidance for review, so the CRA clock was still ticking. My colleague John Berlau congratulates Sen. Moran (Kansas) for bringing this up here.

Of course, if an agency doesn’t bother to follow the law and submit its rules and guidance to the Congress, the rules probably shouldn’t be valid anyway.