Clarence Thomas Goes Rogue, Does the Right Thing for Once

The Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Thursday, ending a case that would have had wide-ranging implications for federal agencies.

In a shocking move, Justice Clarence Thomas took the lead on the 7–2 decision, in which the court decided that the funding mechanism for the financial sector regulator—which comes from a standing pool of funds issued by Congress outside of its typical appropriations bill process—was completely legitimate.

The case reached the Supreme Court after the ultraconservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the method violated the appropriations clause and was thereby unconstitutional.

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

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Samuel Alito argued that the current structure effectively allows the agency to “bankroll its own agenda without any congressional control or oversight.”

“There is apparently nothing wrong with a law that empowers the Executive to draw as much money as it wants from any identified source for any permissible purpose until the end of time,” Alito wrote.

But a conversation about constitutionality is not where the case originated. In 2018, the Community Financial Services Association of America and the Consumer Service Alliance of Texas, a trade association that represents payday lenders and credit-access businesses, sued the bureau in an attempt to plug a crackdown on payday loans.

“For years, lawbreaking companies and Wall Street lobbyists have been scheming to defund essential consumer protection enforcement,” a CFPB spokesperson said in a statement. “The Supreme Court has rejected their radical theory that would have devastated the American financial markets. The Court repudiated the arguments of the payday loan lobby and made it clear that the CFPB is here to stay.”

In another surprise move, Thomas hit back hard at Alito’s dissent, saying his usual far-right comrade in arms had failed to connect his argument to the actual case at hand.

But legal experts were quick to qualify that the high court’s rational decision wasn’t a sign of its moderation, but rather a symptom of how unhinged the Fifth Circuit has become.

“We’re going to come back to this a lot over the next six weeks, but *please* don’t confuse ‘#SCOTUS slaps down a wackadoodle Fifth Circuit decision’ with ‘#SCOTUS is more moderate than its critics claim,’” wrote University of Texas at Austin law professor Steven Vladeck. “‘Not as radical as the Fifth Circuit’ is not the same as ‘moderate.’”

The court will hear more high-profile challenges to the authority of federal agencies in the coming weeks, with two cases focusing on guns and abortion rights.