White House 1, Chamber 0

President Obama sure likes to beat up on business lobbyists.

On Thursday, the president won a major victory in his campaign for financial regulatory reform when the House Financial Services Committee approved legislation to create the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

The agency would “protect the financial interests of everyday Americans with clear rules of the road for financial products and sufficient authority and resources to enforce those rules across the entire market,” Obama said.

Banks and business groups oppose the legislation, which the committee approved on a 39-29 vote, because they contend it would create another confusing layer of regulation for financial firms.

The president took a shot at this opposition in his victory statement.

“This bill has now passed a major hurdle,” Obama said, “and this step sends an important signal to the American people that we will not stand by and allow big financial firms and their lobbyists to mobilize against change.”

“They are doing what they always do—descending on Congress, using every bit of influence they have to maintain the status quo that has maximized their profits at the expense of American consumers, despite the fact that recently those same American consumers bailed them out as a consequence of the bad decisions that they made,” the president said.

You can agree with the president that existing financial regulators did a poor job of protecting the public from shady practices by lenders and still be troubled by his statement.

Not allow “lobbyists to mobilize against change?”

Whatever happened to the constitutional right to petition the government? Has Obama, a former constitutional law professor, forgotten the First Amendment?

Or does he just see political value in staying on the attack? This is similar to the language he used October 9 in remarks touting the Consumer Financial Protection Agency and demonizing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in particular for its ads and lobbying efforts against the legislation.

The Chamber and banks did win some changes in the bill, and they thanked the committee for that.

“However, after several rounds of revisions, this bill remains a complicated and confusing maze of unclear regulatory standards and ill-defined terms,” said David Hirschmann, president and CEO of the Chamber’s Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness. “It is still unclear who this massive new agency would cover, and that is especially alarming for those businesses who are trying to make their way through the economic recovery.”

The American Bankers Association expressed similar concerns. ABA executive vice president Floyd Stoner said the “very broad, ill-defined authority that is granted to this new agency…could be used to justify essentially any regulatory action.”

Hirschmann said the Chamber supports strengthening the ability of existing financial regulatory agencies to look after consumers’ interests instead of “adding yet another layer of government to an already overly complex, confusing, and flawed system.”

The president, however, thinks people who think like that shouldn’t be allowed to mobilize against his agenda.

House Minority Leader John Boehner has a name for Obama’s attitude: “Chicago-style politics.”

“When you can’t win an argument based on the facts, launch vicious political attacks,” Boehner said.

“Democrats are targeting those who don’t immediately fall in line—the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, doctors, Fox News,” he said. “What they are doing is flat-out despicable.”