Saturday (11/25/2017) Qatar likely state sponsor of Sinai terrorist attack

Two US allies — Egypt and India — were attacked yesterday by state-sponsored terrorism. An attack on an Egyptian mosque in the Sinai killed at least 305 worshippers. Although no terrorist group has acknowledged sponsorship for the murderous assault, its likely purpose is to discredit and destabilize Egypt’s anti-Muslim Brotherhood government led by President Sisi. The most likely state sponsor of this and previous Sinai attacks is therefore the pro-Muslim Brotherhood state, Qatar. The principal financial sponsor of Egypt’s predecessor Muslim Brotherhood government was Qatar.

The terrorist attack on India took a somewhat different form, namely, Pakistan’s release to full freedom of Hafiz Saeed, the mastermind of the murderous Mumbai attacks as well as attacks on US citizens. Both President Trump and the US State Department issued a strong denunciation of Pakistan’s move. The state sponsorship of terrorism by Pakistan against India in this case couldn’t be more open.

Previous issues of Founders Broadsheet have highlighted Angelo Codevilla and Caroline Glick’s essays demonstrating the dependency of terrorist groups on state sponsorship, contrary to the myth of their spontaneous origin and independence (See here, here, and here).

The Trump administration should be supporting Saudi Arabia’s effort to isolate Qatar rather than trying broker peace between the two nations. The President seems so inclined but not his Secretaries of State and Defense, at least as of last July.

The unconstitutional CFPB

Consumer Finance Protection Bureau director Richard Cordray has deliberately provoked a conflict with the Trump administration by appointing “Leandra English, the agency’s chief of staff, as deputy director of the CFPB, effective immediately. Citing specific language in the Dodd-Frank Act, which created the CFPB, Cordray said that she would be the acting director of the agency once he left at the end of the day,” the American Banker reports. A few hours later President Trump  “appointed his White House budget director, Mick Mulvaney, as the acting director of the CFPB,” the Washington Post adds.

But the constitutional status of the CFPB itself will be ruled on soon by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit: “In February, the D.C. Circuit granted the [CFPB]’s petition for rehearing en banc — or a rehearing by the full court — of the October 2016 panel decision. Among other things, the panel had declared the bureau’s single-director structure unconstitutional and would have allowed the president to remove the director at will rather than ‘for cause,’ as set forth in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act,” Forbes explains.

There are other constitutional issues regarding the CFPB as well. Under Dodd-Frank its funding comes from the Federal Reserve, not Congress. Thus, its director is not fully accountable to the President, and the agency itself is not accountable to Congress for its budget and spending. For Progressives, the CFPB is thus an ideal agency: staffed by a single expert and removed as far as possible from accountability to the people’s elected representatives.

“Over the years, special interest groups, federal lawmakers and law experts all have argued that the bureau should be changed to a commission,” Forbes continues. “In a commission, the director would serve as the chairman and some sort of quorum would be required. More importantly, it would mean no one person would have nearly unlimited authority.”

But do we really need yet another “Fourth Branch” commission rather than requiring Congress to legislate clear rules that would then be enforced by the Executive branch in a cabinet department? That structure was certainly the Founders intention in 1787.

Click here to go to yesterday’s Founders Broadsheet (“China seeks Indian Ocean naval domination, Co-Prosperity Sphere rerun”)