The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is charged with looking out for consumers when it comes to all things financial, has just found itself in trouble with Congress after it began looking at what it said were disparities between minorities and non-minorities when it comes to auto finance transactions.

The House Committee on Financial Services, saying the consumer agency is overreaching by using questionable data on lenders, passed legislation Thursday by a vote of 47-10 (which included 13 Democrats) making the consumer agency jump through more hoops just to start poring over their books.

And depending on whom you ask, you may now get a better deal, or you may still suffer discrimination.

Here’s what you need to know.

About 80% of all new vehicle purchases are financed, and the CFPB in 2013 started targeting the more than 30 million auto loan transactions that typically occur each year. The auto finance market is worth more than $900 billion and auto loan debt is the third-biggest debt burden for U.S. consumers, behind mortgage loans (70%) and student loan debt (10%). According to the National Association of Minority Auto Dealers (NAMAD), more than 30% of auto buyers are minorities, while just 5% of auto dealerships are minority-owned. The CFPB says that in many cases those minority borrowers may have paid higher rates than whites as part of what’s known as the “dealer reserve.”

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These are negotiations where the auto dealer served as a loan broker to the car buyer to help push the sale through. But in some cases, as much 2.5% in additional interest was tacked on to the loan when the dealer sold the loan to another lender, keeping much of the difference in compensation, sometimes as much as $1,000 per deal. The CFPB says non-whites paid the mark-up, while whites didn’t, and warned auto lenders in March 2013 they’d be investigating if they continued the practice. Consumer advocates like the Center for Responsible Lending say “dealer reserves” could have cost consumers who bought cars in just 2009 alone more than $26 billion over the life of the loan.

But trying to find out who was a minority among those millions of auto loans wasn’t as easy as finding minorities who apply for mortgages.

That’s because unlike mortgage applicants, auto-loan applicants don’t have to disclose their race or ethnicity; it’s strictly prohibited under the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA).

So the CFPB used a proxy method of determining a person’s racial composition by looking at the names of the loan applicants and cross-checking them to where they lived, to see if they had been discriminated against under ECOA.

The CFPB brought complaints against two auto lenders, slapping Ally Bank ALLY, -4.43% , then the second-largest U.S. auto lender behind Wells Fargo WFC, -4.33% , with $98 million in fines and restitution in December 2013, as well as American Honda Finance Corp., the sixth-biggest auto loan lender in 2013, with $24 million in penalties in restitution to borrowers in July of this year.

Read:Honda agrees to repay $24 million to minority auto-loan borrowers

“Too many consumers have had to pay more for their auto loans simply because of their race,” CFPB director Richard Cordray said in December 2013 while announcing the enforcement action against Ally Bank, where the CFPB said that minorities paid $200 to $300 more in interest over the life of the loan. “Too often, these consumers do not know they are paying more or simply unable to get recourse,” he said.

The auto dealers see it differently. “Consumers have the right to find the best loan possible when purchasing a vehicle, the right to negotiate and the right to seek a better deal – and Washington shouldn’t try to deny that right,” said Peter Welch, president of the McLean, Va.-based National Automobile Dealers Association, or NADA, after the House vote on Thursday.

The enforcement decisions have reverberated through the auto industry. For most auto lenders, the CFPB penalties were considered the cost of doing business, and would cost more to litigate than to settle. But that didn’t stop the industry trade organizations from launching a campaign to change the way the CFPB conducts its scrutiny of auto lenders.

NADA complained to Congress that the CFPB’s methodology of determining discriminatory pricing was inaccurate, and has been lobbying Congress heavily, with nearly $3 million in campaign contributions to members in the 2014 election cycle, and another $3.2 million in lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

NADA spokesman Charles Cyrill says the CFPB’s own methodology had a margin of error at predicting a person’s ethnicity was as much as one in five, and that it overestimated African-American loan applicants by more than 40%. In response, the CFPB said that proxy methodology had been used successfully in the health care and fair lending fields, but admitted it wasn’t perfect, saying it was “open to making further improvements in our analysis of fair lending issues.”

The industry’s lobbying, plus the CFPB’s actions against Ally and Honda, unleashed a surprisingly bipartisan critique of the CFPB by both Democrats — including Democratic National Committee chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Republicans on Capitol Hill. Many of them are worried that auto dealers in their districts will have less incentive to broker a loan that boost sales.

From The Wall Street Journal: The Washington War on Car Dealers

“While I think it is critical to ensure that consumers are protected from harmful business practices,” Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, a New Mexico Democrat, wrote to CFPB director Richard Cordray in January this year, “I think it is equally important that we ensure we do not harm small business or impede consumers’ ability to get good rates when shopping for a car,” he said.

So what comes next? Congress will likely instead push the CFPB to use an industry-developed guideline that was negotiated in part with the Department of Justice that allows for half-a-dozen specific instances that the dealer can use to discount the loan rate, although none of which is based on race or ethnicity.

Still, one place where there likely won’t be improvement is in the collection of race and ethnic data in auto loans. NADA opposes the collection of race and ethnicity data by the 65,000 auto lenders in the U.S.

Despite the House vote, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat and former advisor to the Obama Administration on the CFPB, wants to bring auto dealers under the regulatory umbrella of the CFPB and is backing legislation to do just that in the Senate.

In April, she told an audience that the auto loan market “looks increasingly” like the pre-crisis housing market. “The market is now thick with loose underwriting standards, predatory and discriminatory lending practices, and increasing repossessions.”