Republican senators outraged by Wells Fargo’s fraud want to eliminate the agency that uncovered it

http://www.vox.com/2016/9/20/12989688/wells-fargo-cfpb
"Before she was a senator and before Obama was president, Elizabeth Warren laid out the case for creating what became Dodd-Frank’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, making the point that it’s not good enough for consumer abuses to be against the law — there needs to be an agency charged with specifically enforcing those laws. “Each agency, for example, has some power to control certain forms of predatory lending,” she wrote, describing the old status quo, “but their main mission is to protect the financial stability of banks and other financial institutions, not to protect consumers.” Mainstream bank regulators, in other words, are charged with making sure that banks’ balance sheets don’t get too risky. Protecting consumers from rip-offs was always a secondary mission, which in some ways ended up in conflict with the basic safety-and-soundness mission, since tough enforcement of consumer rules can undermine bank profitability. Historically, the needed consumer protection function was carried out at the state and local level (and indeed, in the Wells Fargo case it appears the LA City Attorney’s Office played an important role), but as modern banks are national in the scope of their activities only a national agency can really get a handle on them. With today’s rhetoric, Shelby, Toomey, Corker, and others confirmed that consumer abuses by major national banking conglomerates are a serious problem. Warren, Obama, and other Democrats have a solution to the problem — a national regulatory agency focused on consumer abuses. Banking committee Republicans want to grandstand when banks get caught, while voting to make it much less likely that banks actually do get caught."