The Supreme Court delivered a vehement smackdown to a rogue and lawless lower court on Thursday, upholding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s funding structure by a 7–2 vote. Incredibly, Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s staunchest conservative, wrote the majority opinion emphatically rejecting the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ claim that the CFPB, a consumer watchdog agency, is unconstitutional. In the process, the court exposed the 5th Circuit’s hackish manipulation of history to reach a far-right partisan result with zero basis in law.

That said, Thursday’s decision in CFPB v. Community Financial Services Association is not a sign that SCOTUS is tacking toward the center. Rather, it’s evidence of just how far off the rails the 5th Circuit went after it was stacked with Donald Trump’s aggressive appointees. Trump’s judges are auditioning for a Supreme Court appointment if Trump wins a second term by disregarding all known limits on judicial power to hobble the Biden administration. SCOTUS’s docket is increasingly dominated by the 5th Circuit’s most nihilistic big swings, and Community Financial won’t be the last decision of the term that humiliates the lower court with a lopsided, vehement reversal. These rulings are not really progressive victories, because they involve frivolous cases that should never have existed in the first place. We should not overpraise the Supreme Court for declining to leap into every abyss that the 5th Circuit invites the justices to jump into.

Congress created the CFPB through the Dodd–Frank Act after the financial crisis of 2008, directing the agency to protect consumers against fraud and deception in home mortgages, credit cards, consumer loans, and retail banking. It also gave the agency a broad mandate to guard against “abusive” practices in financial services, which led to a crackdown on high-interest “payday lenders.” One common practice of these predatory businesses is to repeatedly attempt to withdraw money from a borrower’s account long after it’s clear that there are insufficient funds. The business then demands fees from each failed withdrawal. These fees add up, because once payday lenders have identified an account with low funds, they’ll attempt withdrawal over and over again—as many as 11 times a day—to maximize profit.

The CFPB finally banned this practice in 2017. But an association of payday lenders represented by the conservative law firm Jones Day challenged the rule on the grounds that the CFPB is funded unconstitutionally. At least seven appeals courts had previously considered and rejected........

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