Bailout plan would prohibit review of Treasury Secretary's handling of $700 billion

"We need to deal with this and deal with it quickly" -- Hank Paulsen

We "need" to give the Treasury a $700 billion blank check in less than a week? There's no time to consider helping, for example, homeowners in bankruptcy proceedings by returning to bankruptcy judges the power to modify mortgage terms? And, of course, it's being called partisan "games" to cause a delay in passing the bailout package by demanding that consumer protections be added to it -- yet plans to add foreign firms to the bill are in the works.

Reminds me of how the USA PATRIOT Act was drafted, voted on, and signed into law super-quick -- and we've been dealing with the repercussions since.

The plan as the New York Times posted it on the 20th (see the first link, above) has this wonderful clause:

Sec. 8. Review.

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.

That's Chevron deference on crack, folks. Courts are already pretty hands-off in the way they treat decisions by executive agencies. Some agencies are given more deference than others, depending on how an agency's enabling act (that is, the law that created the agency) is worded. Another factor is what the particular situation or case is about. Immigration questions, for instance, courts don't like to touch with a 10-foot pole -- for Constitutional and 19th century yellow scare reasons. In my limited experience, then, you see the greatest deference for agency decisions in the Board of Immigration Appeals, 'cause you get this double whammy of Chevron deference plus a long trend of jurisprudence allowing Congress to outsource the immigration side of sovereignty issues through institutions like INS and, now, DHS.

But this provision gives the Treasury Department even more power over bailout-related decisions than BIA gets in immigration cases -- which is a lot, and which would break your heart if you read even a brief survey of immigration cases in the past 10 years. No review at all by any court or by any other executive agency. A budget of 700 billion taxpayer dollars. Banks and other financial institutions with bad investments hammering at the gate for a piece of the bailout.

What could possibly go wrong?

I've seen more than one blogger suggest that you should call your Representative first thing Monday morning.