The knives were out for Elizabeth Warren. The veteran consumer advocate, Assistant to the President and Harvard law professor — a longtime Republican nemesis and scourge of the banking industry — was appointed by President Obama as temporary custodian of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This half-billion dollar federal super-agency, which starts on July 21 in its job of regulating the mortgage market and protecting Americans from predatory banks, was guaranteed the ire of small-government Republicans.

At a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform — “Consumer Financial Protection Efforts: Answers Needed” — Warren had to face up to a collective of bellicose Republican congressmen angered not only by this expensive, powerful new arm of Leviathan that she currently oversees (dubbed by Rep. Spencer Bachus, Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, as “the most powerful agency ever created”), but also by her snub to the Committee at an earlier date.

This was a great opportunity for House Republicans. Before them was the very incarnation of high-minded, big-government busy-bodying. The naivety of Warren’s professed shock, that her noble new undertaking could possibly attract controversy and become a partisan issue, was difficult to take at face value.

But if the Republicans thought they’d have free reign to make a fool of Warren, they were wrong. Her case was helped considerably by a sturdy turnout from Democrat members: despite their minority standing in the House, they easily matched the Republican presence at the other side of the room. The Democrats prefaced their questions with warm statements of praise and solidarity for a woman they felt had unfairly become a target of sneering, ultra-partisan Republicans representing banks that wish to clip the wings of her new regulatory body.

The sub-prime mortgage crash, which precipitated “the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression,” was also much used by Warren’s Democrat supporters, to justify the Bureau’s creation as a matter of structural, and not just moral, necessity: “we are all paying the price for a lack of regulation.” The Bureau, maintained Warren, would merely be enforcing existing laws that were flouted by the banks that then caused the crash — reducing that complex financial meltdown to a law-and-order issue. “We will be cops on the beat,” said Warren.

Tragic cases of servicemen who had had their mortgages illegally foreclosed upon while on duty overseas, with staffers holding up posterboards depicting individual members of the military alongside details of their bank-induced suffering, were repeatedly invoked by the Democrats, followed by the rallying question: “whose side are you on?” That the issue came to dominate the discussion — even though military families account for a tiny percentage of the demographic the Bureau aims to protect — testifies to both the overall moralistic tone of the hearing, drowning out the economic and managerial concerns of Republicans, and the extent to which the Democrats set the terms of the debate.

To be against the Bureau, the Democrats more than implied, was to side oneself against “our sons and daughters fighting for our country overseas” — a clear appeal to Republican fondness for the military. Such an appeal may also underline Warren’s repeated name-dropping of Holly Petraeus: the wife of the garlanded general (and newly installed Director of the CIA), Mrs. Petraeus has taken up the case of financially abused servicemen and will head the Office of Servicemember Affairs as part of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Warren spoke as if she and Mrs. Petraeus were in constant contact, the very closest of friends, putting Warren right in there with the military establishment.

Warren must have entered the hearing with the trepidation of a sacrificial animal, but she left visibly content. At the end of the hearing, in place of a proposed vote, the two sides reached a compromise. The Democrats used a parliamentary procedure to get the Republicans to issue subpoenas to bank companies previously involved in illegal charges and foreclosures. On the back of this, the Democrats put out a press release entitled “A Bipartisan Victory for Servicemembers.”

Amidst all the partisan posturing, there were a few sturdy objections from Republican congressmen. For instance, the Bureau’s lack of financial and organizational transparency, its ability to set its own pay rates (already higher than general federal salaries) at a time of record national debt, the probable raise in compliance costs for businesses which could harm jobs and prove fatal to small businesses, and the possibility that large banks will use the heightened regulation to clobber smaller rivals who might not be wise to all the rules. But, with all the gushing Democrats and the emotive cases of conned servicemen, busybodying was to win the day.