By Bess Levin

October 25, 2017 "Information Clearing House" -  As a candidate, one of the planks in Donald Trump's campaign platform involved stopping Wall Street from “getting away with murder” and standing up to the “handful of large corporations and political entities that have robbed the working class.” Shockingly, it now appears that such statements were talking points that the president had no intention of following through on—an about-face exemplified late Tuesday night when populist hero Mike Pence cast a tie-breaking 11th-hour vote to overturn a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rule that permits class-action lawsuits against banks and credit unions.

After the Senate vote to repeal the rule, which allows consumers to join together to sue banks or credit-card companies rather than be forced into mandatory arbitration, ended in a 50-50 split, Pence triumphantly stepped in to break the tie. The measure now goes to Trump’s desk, where he will most certainly sign it, even as the administration tries to paint the outcome as a win for the little guy. “The rule would harm our community banks and credit unions by opening the door to frivolous lawsuits by special-interest lawyers,“ White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told NBC News. Acting Comptroller of the Currency Keith Noreika, a former Wall Street lawyer whom the White House used a brazen backdoor move to install in May, added in a statement that “The elected representatives acted to stop a rule from going into effect that would have likely increased the cost of credit for hardworking Americans and made it more difficult for small community banks to resolve differences with their customers without achieving the rule’s goal of deterring future financial abuse. The action by Congress is a victory for consumers and small banks across the country.”

Obviously, Democrats believe otherwise. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who helped to create the consumer bureau, called the bill “a giant wet kiss to Wall Street.” Senator Sherrod Brown asked rhetorically, “Who does forced arbitration help? Wall Street banks and other huge corporations that never pay the price for cheating working people.” And Richard Cordray, the head of the bureau, said in a statement that “Tonight’s vote is a giant setback for every consumer in this country. Wall Street won, and ordinary people lost.”

Overturning the class-action rule is just the first in a series of steps the administration and the G.O.P. hope will end in vanquishing the bureau, which Republicans have been decrying since the day it was legislated into existence. House Financial Services chair __Jeb Hensarling,__who has received millions in campaign contributions from the financial industry and would likely lie down in traffic for Wall Street, has described the C.F.P.B. as a “dictator,” and in May helped pass a bill that would gut the bureau of funding. (The “Choice Act” has not yet made its way to the Senate.)

This article was originally published by Vanity Fair -