And I’m not talking about the numbers (those are merely incomprehensible). I’m talking about the fact that Congress seems poised to – yet again – hand the Bush administration carte blanche to deal with a critical threat, with no apparent thought to the impact. NPR’s Planet Money blog notes:
I would guess that this has to be one of the biggest peacetime transfers of power from Congress to the Administration in history.
[ . . . ]
The Treasury Secretary can buy broadly defined assets, on any terms he wants, he can hire anyone he wants to do it and can appoint private sector companies as financial deputies of the US government. And he can write whatever regulation he thinks are needed.
[ . . . ]
This graph really stands out:
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.
Whoa.
So, for the next three months, and then an additional six months after that, the Treasury Secretary can do anything he deems appropriate without anybody anywhere looking it over.
That seems like an awful lot of absolute power.
And that doesn’t even get to the merits of the matter. For that, we have Paul Krugman, who sums it up as: no deal. (I also recommend following Calculated Risk on this subject.) This is happening quickly, and perhaps the radio reports of Congressional willingness to move forward with this bill in this form were optimistic. I have to hope so. We all do.
Mark Brooks
This is literally the coup-de-gras for the criminals in charge.
This is bigger than the Iraq War spending, or whole huge hunks of the US budget. We as citizens stand to lose in this no matter which way it turns out.
The government didn’t watch carefully enough, cronies put the ‘fix’ in by changing the banking rules, and those of us who are not acrony or a millionaire end up paying the bill once again.
I am getting tired of paying the bill for irresponsible politicians to blow it on hookers and yachts.
No review? Don’t even get me started.
Plin
The whole concept of “no review” is so completely antithetical to the idea of a republic (much less a democracy, but hey, I’m not a Utopianist), I am still trying to wrap my head around why *anyone* would think this is an acceptable idea. I think it’s absolutely insane, frankly, and it terrifies me even more that most people don’t seem to think it’s that big a deal. How far have we fallen? (<–rhetorical question)