Republicans running the House Oversight Committee dragged in Elizabeth Warren, Interim Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau yesterday in order to throw a ready for C-Span hissy fit over the new regulatory nemesis of their buddies and benefactors in the financial and banking sector. Representative Patrick McHenry exemplified the intellectual formidability committee Republicans were packing, making a strong case that in her role as advisor to state attorneys general in a case involving foreclosure fraud by mortgage institutions, she had given advice. Their presentation was so powerful they even forced her to confess.

While no doubt prior to the actual hearing they had envisioned hammering Ms. Warren like a nail, it was they who ended up getting drilled by everybody in the building except the janitors. Ms. Warren drily insinuated that they were tools, and they duly performed in front of the cameras like a bag of hammers, losing their public relations stunt brilliantly.

Worse, Democrats all but chased them around the hearing room with baseball bats for continuing to support the financial sector that had only just finished raping and sodomizing the economy until it collapsed, fingering the GOP as accomplices and co-conspirators. Republicans spent much of the time attempting to run away from talking about anything in semi-near proximity to the actual purpose of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, trying so hard to elude the subject of the brazen irresponsibility and recklessness of the banks and financial institutions that caused the recession, they practically ran for the doors.

This brings me to the question I’ve asked before, “Who Votes for Republicans and for God’s Sakes Why?” which could perhaps be rephrased as, “What Middle Class Person in Her Right Mind Votes for the Republican Party?” Getting a gander at the Republicans on this committee one might be provoked to ask, “Were the Voters who Cast Their Ballots for These Guys Actually of Sound Mind?”

Repeating myself again, I ask, how often are Republicans on the side of the American consumer? “Never” would be the closest one could get to a correct answer. For they simply never are on the side of the small fry, the consumer or average people in their dealings with corporate institutions, banks, telephone companies, cable companies, credit card companies, oil companies or any other powerful entity with which Americans daily struggle to get a fair shake. Republicans always and resolutely defend the interests of, and protect the prerogatives and practices of these institutions and businesses from oversight, responsibility or accountability.

It is true that fat cats from the financial sector, with wheelbarrows full of currency file in and out of the capitol on a round the clock basis with inspiration in the form of contributions to Republican members of congress. So this may not qualify as a mystery for the ages. But the usual manifest hatred of Republicans for regulation is in the case of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Elizabeth Warren herself, the intellectual and moral force behind the Bureau, a fury of Shakespearean acuteness, or at the least, the bloody pique displayed by the villain in your garden variety grindhouse flick.

There is of course the possibility that rather than being bought and sold by the major financial institutions, or being mere putty in the hands of plutocrats, there really is something about the fine print and bewildering legalese in consumers’ financial documents, something about the unpredictable and impenetrable whimsicality of credit card interest rates, or the aesthetics of unregulated mortgage lending that causes the Republican heart to skip a beat.