Even as they wrung their hands and pleaded both for federal support and congressional leniency toward their lending practices, some of America's leading bankers were scurrying about in search of ways to blur the distinction between themselves and streetcorner loan sharks.

Their tool of usury: plastic. Credit cards, once limited to people who actually had credit, in recent decades have become available to the prudent as well as to wastrels — and for the privilege of putting off paying for things, everybody's been paying through the nose. Interest rates you thought applied to that recent purchase, it turns out, go up on your outstanding balance. And if you pay your entire bill every month, well, that'll cost you, in special fees, for denying Shylock his pound of flesh.

Such shady practices came to Congress' attention during the past year's banking collapses — so, along with financial help from grateful taxpayers, our senators and representatives last May passed the Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights.

B-b-but we can't be fair to our customers right away, went the bankers' pitch; it'll take months to, uh, adjust our system. OK, said sympathetic solons; the new rules won't take effect until Washington's birthday, 2010.

But though they needed nearly a year to mend their predatory ways, it was only a matter of days before they were raising already-high interest rates and decreasing credit limits to unsuspecting cardholders.

Awright, you greedy so-and-so's, said Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank; no more Mr. Nice Guy: Yesterday the House voted, 331-92, to impose cardholder rights on the banks immediately, unless they freeze their fees and interest rates.

In the Senate, Banking Committee chairman Chris Dodd of Connecticut also has proposed a freeze — but on that side of the Capitol, there's nervousness that such a reform would reduce the flow of credit just when our nation's economy is looking as if it's bottomed out. And, the bankers are saying with a straight face, it was the economic downturn that made us put the latest squeeze on consumers. As one of the banking industry's favorite errand-boys, Spencer Bachus of Alabama, put it, the House bill "limits choice, rations credit, increases costs and (aargh!) strangles innovation" — parenthetical remark not his.

Funny — a whole lot of Bachus' fellow Republicans were sufficiently embarrassed by the bankers' recent rip-offs to join the Democratic vote for reform. Any senator failing to see the need for it needs stiff scrutiny of his or her campaign-finance records — not to mention his or her wining-and-dining date card.