After White House budget chief and acting CFPB director Mick Mulvaney openly admitted to bankers that as a member of Congress he only met with lobbyists who gave him money, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said on Wednesday that Mulvaney has "made it clear that [his] congressional office was for sale" and called on him to resign immediately.
"Banks and payday lenders already have armies of lobbyists on their sides and they don't need one more."
—Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio)
"Deciding whom you will meet with based on campaign contributions is the kind of pay-to-play that makes Americans furious with Washington, D.C.," Brown, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, said in a speech on the Senate floor Wednesday.
"If the policy from his congressional office has been his policy at [the budget office] and his policy at the consumer bureau, it's corrupted all of his work," Brown added. "Mr. Mulvaney should resign, and the White House should quickly nominate a permanent CFPB director with bipartisan support and a moral compass. Banks and payday lenders already have armies of lobbyists on their sides and they don't need one more."
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Brown was far from the only Democratic lawmaker to condemn Mulvaney's comments after they were first reported by the New York Times Tuesday night.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)—one of the principal forces behind the creation of the CFPB, an agency Mulvaney is currently attempting to gut from the inside—responded to the budget chief's remarks with a simple tweet on Wednesday: "This is the most corrupt administration ever."
In a later appearance on MSNBC, Warren added that Mulvaney's comments exhibit a "form of corruption that has now become so thorough, so deep, so embedded in these people that they're not even ashamed...That's what corruption is all about."
