Jeff Gelles: At your service: Consumer protection bureau hits the ground running

Here's a confession: Occasionally, I miss the Wild West days of consumer reporting, the ones before the new sheriff came to town.

In those lively old days, finding tricks and traps in a lender's fine print was like shooting fish in a barrel. Clever lawyers wrote terms that continually tripped up even sophisticated borrowers - like the "zero interest" teaser rates that suddenly vanished because a lender could point to a credit report showing a late payment on a totally unrelated bill.

More than once, they brought to mind that icon of the customer rip-off: the innkeeper in the musical version of Victor Hugo's classic Les Miserables, who boasted of charging guests for the lice, "extra for the mice," and "2 percent for looking in the mirror twice."

"Gotcha" terms haven't disappeared from the consumer marketplace and probably never will. Just ask cellphone customers who get socked with thousands of dollars in unexpected charges for "data roaming" overseas, or broadband subscribers whose service is suspended because they accidentally blew past a provider's monthly data cap.

But those finance-industry lawyers? Instead of crafting the latest version of the "universal default" or other terms finally outlawed as bait-and-switch-style deception, at least some are busy watching over the shoulder of the new sheriff: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a centerpiece of 2010's Dodd-Frank financial reform.

If you've been watching the political cross fire, you know the new agency hasn't had an easy ride into town, thanks to congressional Republicans who still strangely object to the idea of a little more marketplace law and order.

First, they scared President Obama away from naming Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren to head the new agency she initially proposed. (A success they may live to regret, since Warren is running for the Senate from Massachusetts and proving to be a forceful voice in national debates, anyway.)

Then, GOP senators upped the ante: Led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, they demanded that Democrats agree to rewrite Dodd-Frank to weaken the new agency before they'd consider confirming anyone as its director - a maneuver they knew blocked the CFPB from fulfilling many of its new duties.