According to Avi Zenilman, both sides are beginning to balk at the bailout plan. And no wonder, we’ve been down the “trust me”/”no oversight” rabbit hole before with this administration.
As of Friday night, Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke’s proposal to spend $700 billion of government money to buy up the bad debt that had infected the financial system looked like it would have little trouble rushing through Congress.
Then, on Saturday, the plan was released: less than 850 words long, it called for giving Paulson purchasing authority that was “non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”
“We need to get this done quickly, and the cleaner the better,’ President Bush said in a press conference this morning.
That may still happen. But as the day went on, the legislators, economists, and pundits from both sides of the political aisle that had provided a bipartisan sheen of consensus to Paulson and Bernanke’s previous moves quickly began casting doubts on the wisdom of a policy that would allow the Treasury Department to purchase hundreds of billions of dollars of difficult-to-price assets from financial institutions without oversight or an explicit quid pro quo limiting future risky behavior.
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