If you wonder why so many people are concerned about Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren’s potential appointment to lead the Obama administration’s new consumer financial protection agency, the headline of a new Bloomberg Businessweek cover story offers a good clue:

She’s With the Government, And She’s Here to Help

You might also appreciate this North Carolina-related excerpt from the piece:

Were it not for a head of prematurely gray hair, Patrick McHenry could still pass for the college Republican he once was. Elected to Congress from North Carolina seven years ago at age 29, he speaks through an assiduous smile and arches his eyebrows as he listens—furrowing them quizzically at arguments he disagrees with. In late May, McHenry assumed the role of Warren’s chief antagonist in Congress. At an oversight hearing he was chairing, McHenry accused Warren of misleading Congress about whether she had given advice to Treasury and Justice Dept. officials who were investigating companies for mortgage fraud. McHenry said she had concealed her conversations. Warren insisted she had disclosed them.

The hearing then took a bizarre turn. McHenry called for a recess so members of the committee could go to the House floor for a vote. Warren replied that she had agreed to testify for an hour and could not stay any longer.

“Congressman, you are causing problems,” she said. “We had an agreement.” Offended, McHenry shot back: “You’re making this up, Ms. Warren. This is not the case.” Warren’s response, an outraged gasp, was played on cable news.

In a conversation a month later in his Capitol Hill office, McHenry is eager to emphasize that his problem is not with Warren, but with the bureau itself. That’s not to say he feels he has anything to apologize for. “I’ve asked questions of a litany of Administration officials from Democrat and Republican Administrations, and I’ve never seen an action by any witness like I saw that day,” he says.

Like most congressional Republicans—and a broad array of business groups, including the Chamber of Commerce, the Financial Services Roundtable, and the National Association of Federal Credit Unions—McHenry opposed the creation of the CFPB and voted against Dodd-Frank. At the time, the bureau’s opponents argued that its seemingly noble goals would not only hurt financial firms—depriving them of the ability to compensate for risky borrowers by charging higher interest rates—they would also hurt borrowers. The prospect of limits on the sort of rates and fees they could charge would cause banks and payday lenders alike to lend less and to not lend at all to marginal borrowers at a time when the economy needed as much credit as it could get.

Where it’s not actively harmful, McHenry argues, the bureau will be redundant. If there’s fraud or deceptive marketing in the consumer lending market, the federal government can prosecute it through the Federal Trade Commission. Clearer mortgage forms are all well and good, but Congress can take care of that, he says, noting that he introduced legislation for a simpler mortgage form three years ago.