The former Trump operative tells Fox News that the CFPB had done nothing to help consumers without giving any examples of their failures and then blamed the horrific housing crises on the U.S. government instead of his friends on Wall street.

The Trump administration has yet again made the U.S. government a laughingstock by sending Mick Mulvaney, a man who loathes the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to run it while the outgoing director already named Leandra English, to run the bureau.

On Fox News' Outnumbered, Steve Cortes, a former Trump Hispanic Advisory Council member and Wall Street veteran was the #OneLuckyGuy and he performed like a true Trump rabid fan.

The topic of the clusterf*ck over who heads the CFPB was debated in the second half of the show and Cortes was upset that Trump's authority was being challenged.

Co-host Kennedy played a clip from Barney Frank on CNN this morning who praised the agency calling it "the most effective agency for the consumer that we ever had."

Kennedy, who is a libertarian asked, "Is it really that effective?"

Cortes replied, "No, in a word."

And as with most Trump advisers, he gave no reasons why the CFPB had failed.

And then he proceeded to call the CFPB part of the swamp that Trump was supposed to drain.

Cortes continued, "I think this is the idea of the swamp at work. My favorite Steve Segal movie of all movie was 'Hard to Kill.' The swamp is hard to kill." The idea that a bureaucrat thinks that because they resigned or retired that they get to appoint their own successor rather than the president is an absurdity on its face."

As Barney Frank told CNN, the idea was to keep the CFPB away from political pressures,
so they created a five-year term and mandatory successor for the director specifically to protect the bureau against political interference.

They understood a Republican could try and appoint a creep like Mulvaney to destroy the entire agency.

All strains of Republicans hate the CFPB because it tries to protect Americans from the evils of Wall Street and the free markets that try to run roughshod over consumers.

Kennedy lambasted the idea that an advisory board was even necessary because of too much needless government.

Cortes replied, "Does the government protect the financial system? Look no further than the housing crisis which I would argue was almost 100% created by too much government insight and intrusion into the mortgage crisis."

The CFPB was created because the government failed in its duty to protect the public from predatory lending practices, you freaking moron.

And anyone who blames the U.S. government for the entire financial collapse created in the housing market is not fit to be on TV.

He continued, "Does government protect the consumer? Of course not. What it does is create a bureaucracy that exists for its own benefit, for its own self-aggrandizement and does very little."

This is myopic to the point of total blindness.

In 2015, Mike Konczal listed the CFPB's accomplishments in its short existence:

First, it fines businesses for bad practices, creating a real penalty for breaking the law.

Second, it's started to shed light into the previously dark areas of the credit, debt, and financial systems.

• Through 2015, there's been $10.1 billion in relief to consumers, much of it stemming from manipulative conduct in mortgage services or deceptive practices in the credit card industry.
• The CFPB launched an investigation into the for-profit college ITT and argued it "misled students by overstating their salaries and job prospects upon graduation." This action helped launch a series of important investigations into for-profit schools that has so far culminated in the collapse of Corinthian Colleges.
• The CFPB wrote a rule determining what makes a "qualifying loan" for the purposes of mortgage making, requiring lenders to determine that borrowers have an ability to pay the mortgages they take out.
• The agency has also written rules over the debt payments and servicing for mortgages, and is investigating the debt payments and servicing of student loans, with a hint to writing future rules.
• It is supervising the previously opaque consumer credit reporting market, as well as non-bank debt collectors. Consumers, individually, have very little power to police these markets, and regulators previously ignored them.

The CFPB is operating, as intended, as a "cop on the beat" whose sole focus is to aggressively seek out instances of anti-consumer malfeasance. These are markets where any one individual doesn't have the time, expertise, or resources to combat fraud. Thus, assigning that responsibility to one team of administrators can do the work better and more efficiently than any individual.

The CFPB doesn't line its pockets with sweet deals and unaccounted monies flowing in from fat cat donors, Steve.

Yet Republicans all hate it because for conservatives, any oversight is a thing to be feared and hated and never wanted.