JUST ANOTHER DAY IN WASHINGTON: Payday Lenders File Lawsuit To Shut Down ‘Operation Choke Point’.

Launched in 2013 by the Obama administration, Operation Choke Point “was created by the Justice Department to ‘choke out’ companies the Administration considers a ‘high risk’ or otherwise objectionable, despite the fact that they are legal businesses,” according to a recent staff report from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Payday lenders as well as manufacturers, distributors, and retailers of firearms are among the companies the report identified as targeted as “objectionable” by the initiative.

In a statement released on Friday, Dennis Shaul, the CEO of the payday lending trade association, the Community Financial Services Association [CFSA], said “[i]t is unfortunate that we now must resort to litigation to protect legal, regulated businesses from this improper federal regulatory overreach.” . . .

The complaint further charges that “The Defendant agencies’ actions were taken without observance of the procedures required by law, are arbitrary and capricious, exceed Defendants’ statutory authority, and deprive Plaintiffs of liberty interests without due process of law.”

It seems that the government has a good model going: Do something egregiously illegal, convince your opponents to go through a lengthy legal process, and by the time a court tells you to go easy (if that happens at all), either keep going or just stop if you’ve already done what you had wanted to do in the first place. Repeat.