Yesterday afternoon, President Trump signed into law S.J. Res. 57, the joint resolution under the Congressional Review Act (CRA) that disapproves the CFPB’s Bulletin 2013-2 regarding “Indirect Auto Lending and Compliance with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.”  The General Accountability Office had determined that the Bulletin, which set forth the CFPB’s disparate impact theory of assignee liability for so-called auto dealer “markup” disparities, was a “rule” subject to override under the CRA.

The joint resolution was passed by the Senate in April 2018 by a vote of 51 to 27 and by the House earlier this month by a vote of 234 to 175.  We recently shared our thoughts on the implications of Congressional disapproval.

The CFPB issued a statement about the signing that included a statement from Acting Director Mulvaney that referred to the Bulletin as an “initiative that the previous leadership at the Bureau pursued [that] seemed like a solution in search of a problem.”  Mr. Mulvaney said that “those actions were misguided, and the Congress has corrected them.”

The CFPB stated that the resolution’s enactment “does more than just undo the Bureau’s guidance on indirect auto lending.  It also prohibits the Bureau from ever reissuing a substantially similar rule unless specifically authorized to do so by law.”  Most significantly, the CFPB indicated that it “will be reexamining the requirements of the ECOA” in light of “a recent Supreme Court decision distinguishing between antidiscrimination statutes that refer to the consequences of actions and those that refer only to the intent of the actor” and “the fact that the Bureau is required by statute to enforce federal consumer financial laws consistently.”

This is presumably a reference to the Supreme Court decision in Inclusive Communities and the fact that the ECOA discrimination proscription does not proscribe discriminatory effects but, rather, speaks solely in terms of discrimination “against any applicant on the basis of” race, national origin and other prohibited bases.  As we have observed previously, the basis for the Inclusive Communitiesholding with respect to the FHA, which is summarized at the end of Section II of the majority opinion, highlights material differences between the FHA and the ECOA.  The distinctions between discrimination statutes that refer to the consequences of actions and those that do not is illustrated vividly by a textual juxtaposition chart that appeared in the House Financial Services Committee Majority Staff Report titled “Unsafe at Any Bureaucracy: CFPB Junk Science and Indirect Auto Lending.”  The Business Lawyer article cited in that report, “The ECOA Discrimination Proscription and Disparate Impact – Interpreting the Meaning of the Words that Actually Are There,” discusses this issue in further detail.  The CFPB’s plans to reexamine ECOA requirements could represent an overture to revisiting Regulation B (which implements the ECOA) and the Regulation B Commentary.

With regard to the Bulletin’s status as the first guidance document to be disapproved pursuant to the CRA, the CFPB commented that the resolution’s enactment “clarifies that a number of Bureau guidance documents may be considered rules for purposes of the CRA, and therefore the Bureau must submit them for review by Congress.”  The CFPB indicated that it plans to “confer with Congressional staff and federal agency partners to identify appropriate documents for submission.”