A battalion of conservative think-tank luminaries battled for hours with Democratic House members Wednesday over the Republican effort to undo the Dodd-Frank financial reform act.

The conservatives were called in to testify in support of the Financial CHOICE Act by Rep. Jeb Hensarling, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and one of the leaders in the effort to essentially repeal key components of Dodd-Frank. 

The CHOICE Act is the GOP vehicle for undoing Dodd-Frank, but during the committee session, House Democracts derided it as the "Wrong CHOICE Act."

Peter Wallison, a financial policy wonk with the American Enterprise Institute, claimed the Dodd-Frank Act deserves the primary blame for the slow recovery from the 2008 financial crisis.

The law was passed in 2010 in large measure to prevent a repeat of the problems that led to that crisis.

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., a ranking member of the committee, said she feared the CHOICE Act's removal of financial industry safeguards could lead to a repeat of the financial meltdown. Other Democrats who were on the committee when Dodd-Frank was passed, including New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney, California Rep. Brad Sherman and Rep. Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts, criticized the proposal for the same reason.

Lynch asserted the CHOICE Act is the worst legislation he has seen in his 16 years in Congress.

“It affects every home and business in America today,” he said.

Wallison argued that one of the products of Dodd-Frank, the Financial Stability Oversight Council, shouldn’t have the power to force Federal Reserve oversight on large insurers by designating them as large enough and risky enough to pose a risk to the financial system if they fail.

“State insurance regulation has been very successful,” he said.

Wallison charged Dodd-Frank caused a big decline in small banks, which hurt small businesses that relied on them for loans.

Responding to that claim in a tweet, Ed Mierzwinski, program director at U.S. PIRG, said Wallison is ignoring the role more than 30 years of bank consolidation has played in the decline of small banks.

Norbert Michel, financial regulations fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said Dodd-Frank has needlessly increased borrowing costs.

While the bill calls for restrictions on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Michel said Congress should go further and put its authority in the Federal Trade Commission.

Hester Peirce, a senior research fellow at the Koch family-funded Mercatus Center, said the CHOICE Act takes a healthy step by allowing more investors to qualify as accredited, giving them access to a broader array of investments.

“Because many investors prefer to invest through pools, the relief afforded to pooled investment vehicles and their advisors by the CHOICE Act could also be instrumental in expanding small businesses’ access to capital,” said Peirce, whose nomination by President Obama as a Republican commissioner for the Securities and Exchange Commission in October 2015 failed to gain a full Senate vote.

In addition to the conservative critics of Dodd-Frank, the committee also heard from one of the people involved in the law's creation. Michael Barr, a University of Michigan law professor and former assistant U.S. treasurer who was one of the architects of Dodd-Frank, told the committee that it's a safe bet that no revisions to Dodd-Frank will be passed by Congress this year.

One of the changes Barr said he would like for Dodd-Frank is a simplification of the “know your customer” rules for investment advisors, broker dealers and banks. The rules create too much paperwork and don’t help catch bad guys, he said.