An overwhelming majority of Americans strongly supports the work of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which has been busy returning money to defrauded consumers and bringing commonsense rules to a market that desperately needed them. By contrast, the leaders of the House Financial Services Committee have relentlessly attacked the bureau in terms that echo the arguments of the worst elements of the financial services industry.

Consider the online survey that the committee announced in advance of today’s semiannual CFPB oversight hearing. The committee says it “wants to hear from Americans about [the] consumer bureau’s impact on their lives and livelihoods.” Lest anyone mistake this for an honest or open-minded inquiry, however, the survey is prefaced by a crazed description of the CFPB as an agency out to “restrict your freedom of choice and your opportunities to obtain credit.”

It is hard to imagine such nonsense coming from anyone but an industry lobbyist seeking to preserve the ability of lenders to peddle more of the kind of deceptive and abusive products that nearly capsized the entire U.S. economy just over five years ago. For now, sadly, lenders like that seem to be the constituency that the Financial Services Committee leadership has chosen to represent.

Meanwhile, the CFPB has been proving its worth through rulemaking and enforcement actions that have brought much-needed transparency and fairness to the world of mortgages, credit cards, student loans, and other basic financial products. Consumers are better off and the marketplace is more stable in ways that just about everyone can plainly see.