Newt Gingrich Says Elizabeth Warren’s Signature Program Is "Dictatorial." Here's What It's Really Done.

If eliminating $16 billion in hidden credit card fees is dictatorial, he's right.

—By Patrick Caldwell | Mon Dec. 28, 2015 6:05 AM EST

"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," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich solemnly intoned in his opening statement as an expert witness at a congressional hearing on December 16. "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 and outside conservative groups spent much of 2015 attacking the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)—the federal financial regulator that opened in 2011, conceived and launched by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) after it was included in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law.