Playing Politics
In the next couple of days, I predict you're going to start seeing charges by Republicans that Democrats are "holding up the financial bailout" and "playing politics with the country's financial future".
Why? Because President Bush has already done so.
Included in the legislation that Bush has asked Congress to sign is the following section:
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.
This was entered for one of two reasons: To further push the balance of power towards the executive branch and away from the other two branches of federal government, or to be caught and force the Democrats to hold up the bill, thus opening themselves up to criticisms in the days before the election.
Probably both, for the Administration and the Republican Party, it's a win-win.
But read that section very carefully. In plain English, it says "Secretary Paulson has sole discretion over the disbursment of $700 billion dollars of taxpayer money, and he may be overseen by no one, nor may he be sued for it".
Understand that if the bill passes into law including this section, Secretary Paulson could write checks to himself and six top Republicans for $100 billion each and there'd be no one who could even call him on it.
While that outcome is highly unlikely, the fact that that would be possible means that it would also be possible for him to make really poor decisions, buying bad mortgages out at face value instead of at whatever bargain rate would be sufficient to save the companies in question without totally absolving them of any of their losses, or without any sort of punitive repercussions for the leaders of those companies.
And, to my mind, it says that we should trust implicitly the problem solving skills of the guys who were in charge when the problem happened, the guys who should have had sufficient oversight to stop it from happening in the first place.
I don't think so.
Just remember this little gem when someone tells you that "the Democrats" played politics with the bill and delayed this vital legislation.
Liam.
posted by Liam at 9/22/2008 07:56:00 PM
2 Comments:
Interesting.
And did I interpret the proposed act correctly as saying that the authority is for two years? And I believe it said that the Secretary must report to all the financial congressional committees within 3 months and then semi-annually thereafter? So he's required to report but those committees can not have any authority over what he reports? And he's only required to report within 3 months, at the time a new president takes office?
I'm surprised there's nothing in there saying that the current Secretary can't be removed during that 2 year period.
It all smells, doesn't it?
Monday, September 22, 2008 10:05:00 PM
Well remember, the Secretary is a cabinet level position, I doubt that even such a law would have any validity. After all, the new President (whoever he may be) would just challenge it as an unconstitutional Legislative branch law infringing on his right to choose his own cabinet and it'd be over.
So I'm not surprised that that isn't in there. But there's a LOT of damage Bush and Paulson could do in the four months that remain to them.
Yeah, the whole "reporting" thing is kind of meaningless if nothing he does can be reviewed or countermanded, and in fact it wouldn't surprise me at all if Bush pointed to this clause and claimed that it superceded the reporting clause, and that reporting was tantamount to oversight, and so refused to let Paulson testify at all.
Liam.
Monday, September 22, 2008 10:24:00 PM
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