Noted financial services expert Newt Gingrich was given the opportunity by congressional Republicans to testify about the horrors of consumer financial protection earlier this month. Because it's a Republican Congress and it's Newt Gingrich. Turns out, Newt thinks protecting consumers from predatory lenders is a bad idea. And worse.

"Today, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is so far outside the historic American model of constitutionally limited government and the rule of law that it is the perfect case study of the pathologies that infect our bureaucracies at the federal level. […] It is dictatorial. It is unaccountable. It is practically unrestrained in expanding on its already expansive mandate from Congress. And it is contemptuous of the rights, values, and preferences of ordinary Americans."

Republicans have been attempting to kill the CFPB since its inception with almost the same zeal that they've been trying to destroy Obamacare. You have no more right protecting your meager finances from predators than you do keeping your body healthy in the Republicans' world. But just as Obamacare is helping to save actual lives, the CFPB is directly helping people, saving them billions of dollars.

Earlier this month, the CFPB released a report examining how one part of its financial regulation has unfolded. The CARD Act, passed in 2010 and overseen by the CFPB, aimed to clean up the credit card industry by eliminating hidden fees that hurt consumers.



According to the CFPB, the CARD Act's changes saved consumers from $16 billion in these sorts of hidden fees between 2011 and 2014. Most of those savings have been paid for with higher upfront interest rates. Still, the total cost of credit cards declined in the first few years after the law's enactment and has held steady since then at about 2 percent less than before the CARD Act.

That's just one of its regulations, and just one aspect of its success in the five years of its existence. Those successes—that's the real problem for Republicans and for Wall Street interests that bankroll them. For example, Gingrich was actually testifying as "a paid adviser to a corporate-funded group, the US Consumer Coalition," a group which does not disclose its donors but was created by a PR firm for the sole purpose of bringing down the CFPB, the banking industry's enemy number 1.

But it's not just the fact that Wall Street hates anything that might make them put the good of the country ahead of their profits that fuels Republicans. It's the evidence that government can do something meaningful to actually make people's lives better. That, in Republicanland, is just not acceptable.