"On November 24, 2017, Richard Cordray resigned as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. His final year in office, and especially his exit, revealed the true nature of the agency Democrats created through the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. ...

"Since 2010, Republicans have argued that the CFPB's unique structure -- an independent agency whose single director the president can fire only for cause, with guaranteed funding through Federal Reserve Bank profits rather than the congressional appropriation process -- is a recipe for government abuse, if not unconstitutional. Cordray proved them right.

"[Sen. Elizabeth] Warren built a political battleship, and Cordray deployed it. The bureau's powerful media division dictated policy to its regulatory professionals and relentlessly exaggerated the agency's achievements in daily press releases and social-media posts. Political operatives used the CFPB's super-independence to stonewall congressional subpoenas and hide unethical investigation tactics, internal discrimination problems, and other inconvenient facts. Republican critics were dismissed as Wall Street sycophants.

"Meanwhile, millions of dollars were diverted from the CFPB to Democratic allies. From 2014 to 2017, the bureau paid $11 million a year to rent office space in an Obama fundraiser's building. The Dodd-Frank Act allowed the CFPB to send the civil money penalties collected in its enforcement actions to a trustee of its choice, who, after taking a healthy cut, distributed the funds to ostensible victims in unrelated matters. The maneuver both enriched Democratic trustees and transformed fines extracted from defenseless businesses based on their deep pockets rather than actual consumer harm into 'over $12 billion in damages returned to 29 million injured consumers.' To spread such propaganda, the bureau paid over $43 million to GMMB, the liberal advocacy group that created ads for the Obama and Hillary Clinton presidential campaigns."

Read entire article here

Thanksgiving has always been a special holiday, an opportunity for family reunions, bountiful feasts, marathon football games and the traditional kickoff of the Holiday Season. We travel home by car, train, plane and bus to come together with loved ones. As Americans gather with friends and family this week, let us not forget those brave men and women who put themselves in harms' way to protect our freedoms. They won't gather with their families. They'll be enjoying their Thanksgiving dinner on bases, in tents and aboard ships far from home. So, this Thanksgiving, please take time to let our troops know how grateful we are for their service and that they are in our thoughts as we give thanks.

The Center for Individual Freedom offices will be closed on Thursday, November 23rd and Friday, November 24th in observance of the Thanksgiving Holiday.

The Liberty Update will return next week.

"'Gifts to cultivate friendship are not bribes,' Abbe Lowell said in his closing in defense of Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez -- and enough jurors agreed to result in a hung jury and a mistrial. ...

"Even if the criminal law has been so diminished that private jets and luxury resorts don't constitute bribes, any reasonable standard of ethics tells us taking and concealing such gifts is wrong. Especially when they're being given by a friend who runs a Medicare fraud scheme for which the senator actively lobbies.

"A jury of Bob Menendez's peers heard the evidence and the arguments, and some of the jurors agreed with the 'just a friend' defense. Now the impetus is on the Senate Ethics Committee to do its job and, failing that, for the voters of New Jersey to conduct an act of political hygiene in next year's Senate election."

"'Political morality' may seem an oxymoron, but our children and grandchildren need to know that there are still responsible adults, no matter what their political affiliation, who will protect them from a vulgarized culture -- and who will scorn those who need disdaining, whatever the political cost. Politics is cheap, but a culture is priceless."

"The US congresswoman who testified that current members of Congress are known sex harassers said Tuesday night that $15 million in hush money has been paid to accusers.

"Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif) told MSNBC that the millions have been doled out to alleged victims of harassment from congressional members over the past decade. ...

"She did not discose what members of Congress have been accused of sexual misconduct."

"The FCC stands at the brink of a major achievement -- ending a failed two-year experiment in federal micromanagement of broadband and a return to the effective, bipartisan 'light-touch' policy under which the Internet has thrived for the past two decades.

"Chairman Ajit Pai's return to deregulation promises to unleash a new burst of network deployment and innovation, throwing off failed regulatory shackles that saw broadband investment drop $2.4 billion in the last two years.

"But in a classic case of one step forward, two steps back, the extreme 'resistance' armies of the far left are threatening to attack this progress with a rear-guard campaign pressuring state and local governments to undermine the FCC's deregulatory order.

"This obstructionist strategy risks slicing the Internet into a balkanized patchwork of fifty different regulatory regimes and grinding the digital economy to a standstill. The FCC has the power to prevent this disastrous outcome, and it absolutely must do so. ...

"The FCC can avoid this outcome by including in the final Restoring Internet Freedom order a clear statement reclassifying broadband as an interstate information service and establishing a clear national policy of light-touch deregulation overseen by the FCC and FTC.

"For the sake of the Internet's future, let's hope they do so."

Read entire article here

"What kind of demonic soul walks into a church a murders 26 innocent people, including several children, at point-blank range?

"What kind of heartless monster instantly seizes on such senseless tragedy to advance a personal political agenda?

"Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts Democrat, for one. Authorities identified the killer as a severely deranged and violent reject illegally in possession of guns, but Ms. Warren somehow accused the Republican Party of perpetrating the atrocity. ...

"Such is the state of politics in America today that one entire wing of elected politicians is dominated by people who eagerly salivate every time a whacko gunman goes on some senseless rampage."

"All those patdowns and all that time in all those TSA lines, and it remains just 'security theater': Transportation Security Administration screeners are still basically worthless.

"News out of the House Committee on Homeland Security this week is that TSA agents missed 80 percent of undercover testers' mock knives, guns and explosives. ...

"[I]t's still undeniable that the main achievement of the TSA's most public activity is inflicting pointless delays and inconvenience on travelers."

"So, now we know.

"We know that the Texas church shooter should not have been able to own or obtain a gun under federal law. He had a long history of mental illness and criminal behavior: He escaped from a mental institution in 2012, threatened his superior officers and attempted to smuggle weapons onto a military base to carry out those threats, cracked the skull of his infant stepson, beat his wife, abused a dog. He was convicted of domestic violence and did twelve months in the brig and was busted down in rank to E-1. The Air Force failed to inform the FBI, and so the shooter successfully bought four weapons in four years.

"This isn't unique. The racist Charleston church-massacre perpetrator obtained his gun despite pending felony charges; the FBI screwed up. The Orlando nightclub shooter had been investigated twice by the FBI, but they didn't charge him with a crime. The Sandy Hook shooter obtained his weapons illegally. The FBI simply missed the San Bernardino terrorists, despite years of open talk about carrying out a terror attack.

"And yet the Left continues to maintain that government action should be the chief methodology for stopping mass shootings. In particular, it insists that we pass new gun-control laws. There has been no significant call to make government agencies more efficient or staff them more appropriately; in fact, the Left has repeatedly shied away from blaming the government generally. Instead, we're told that a few more words on a few more pieces of paper should ensure that babies aren't shot in church pews."

Read entire article here

"Trump may have received setbacks by proxy at the ballot boxes in New Jersey and Virginia, but in the realm of foreign policy he is achieving signal success. Who knew this would be the area of his greatest accomplishments, the area where he appeared to have no prior experience whatsoever? ...

"On the foreign front ... Trump is succeeding as no American president has in years. By taking the gloves off our troops, he has given ISIS the boot (at least in their quondam caliphate) and helped put in place conditions that are causing the current shakeup in Saudi Arabia that most see as salutary. This will enable the Saudis to modernize and confront Islamo-imperialist Iran before the mullahs run rampant over the entire Middle East -- something any decent person should applaud, at least if he or she isn't part of the former Obama administration.

"In the next day or so Trump will facing his biggest foreign test yet... no, not Putin, though he is apparently on the schedule... Xi Jinping. China is obviously our primary adversary with Russia not much more than a sideshow, despite what Robert Mueller or Fusion GPS might tell us. The battle for the 21st century will be between China and the U.S., possibly with India, not Russia, as a distant third."