The Real Story Behind the Chrysler Bankruptcy
If you worry about the abuse of executive power and declining respect among elected officials for the rule of law, you should watch this eloquent illumination of what really went down in the Chrysler bankruptcy earlier this year. The speaker is Richard Mourdock, Treasurer of the state of Indiana. The setting is a Cato Institute policy forum on October 15 about the “sordid details of the Bush/Obama auto industry intervention.”
As state treasurer, Mourdock is the person responsible for investment decisions concerning Indiana’s state employee pension funds, some of which owned a small share of Chrysler’s $6.9 billion in secured debt and some of which opposed the administration’s offer of $.29 on the dollar for that debt. Though these small secured holders were publicly castigated by President Obama as “unpatriotic” and unwilling to sacrifice for the greater good, Mourdock led the effort to stop the “sale” of Chrysler all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Mourdock’s presentation gives a flavor for the tactics employed by the Obama administration to “encourage” senior, priority creditors to back off their claims so that chosen parties could take priority—tactics that included backroom reminders that some of those creditors had received and might seek more TARP funding, threats of bringing the full weight and measure of the White House press office to bear down on dissenters, public condemnation, and other forms of arm-twisting most Americans would find unseemly for a U.S. presidential administration.
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Regulatory Studies; Tax and Budget Policy; Trade and Immigration
Wednesday Links
- Senate Judiciary Committee abandons hope of bringing any real change to the Patriot Act. Julian Sanchez in The Nation: “The Obama administration makes vague, reassuring noises about constraining executive power and protecting civil liberties, but then merrily adopts whatever appalling policy George W. Bush put in place.”
- Cognitive Dissonance: New poll shows rising support for a so-called public option in health care, even as the public continues to oppose greater government control over the health care system.
- It has been tried before: Why increasing the size of government won’t work.
- Podcast: The real problem with American health care: You are not the customer. More here.
The Emperor’s Green Clothes
According to Thursday’s New York Times, “the Obama administration announced on Wednesday that it was moving forward on new rules to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from hundreds of power plants and large industrial facilities.”
President Obama has said that he prefers a comprehensive legislative approach to regulating emissions and stemming global warming, not a piecemeal application of rules, and that he is deeply committed to passage of a climate bill this year.
But he has authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to begin moving toward regulation, which could goad lawmakers into reaching an agreement.
In the book that popularized the phrase “the Imperial Presidency,” historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. focused overwhelmingly on the vast growth of presidential power in foreign affairs. But as an inveterate New Dealer, Schlesinger had a blind spot where it came to the Emperor’s burgeoning powers at home.
The Supreme Court’s virtual abandonment of the nondelegation doctrine after 1935 paved the way for the modern administrative state, in which Congress all too eagerly cedes legislative power to the executive branch. As the Obama administration’s latest actions on global warming show, the Imperial Presidency comes in green, too. From my column in the Washington Examiner this week:
James Madison believed that there could be “no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person.” And yet, here we are, with those powers united in the person of a president who has pledged to heal the planet and stop the oceans’ rise.
Good News: 9/11 Didn’t ‘Change Everything’
On the eighth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and D.C., things are going much better than most of us dared hope in the initial aftermath of that horrible day. We’re still a secure, prosperous, and relatively free country, and the fear-poisoned atmosphere that governed American politics for years after 9/11 has thankfully receded.
Not everyone’s thankful, however. Boisterous cable gabber Glenn Beck laments the return to normalcy. The website for Beck’s “9/12 Project” waxes nostalgic for the day after the worst terrorist attack in American history, a time when “We were united as Americans, standing together to protect the greatest nation ever created.” Beck’s purpose with the Project? “We want to get everyone thinking like it is September 12th, 2001 again.”
My God, why in the world would anyone want that? Yes, 9/12 brought moving displays of patriotism and a comforting sense of national unity, but that hardly made up for the fear, rage and sorrow that dominated the national mood and at times clouded our vision.
But Beck’s not alone in seeing a bright side to national tragedy. Less than a month after people jumped from the World Trade Center’s north tower to avoid burning to death, David Brooks asked, “Does anybody but me feel upbeat, and guilty about it?” “I feel upbeat because the country seems to be a better place than it was a month ago,” Brooks explained, “I feel guilty about it because I should be feeling pain and horror and anger about the recent events. But there’s so much to cheer one up.”
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics; Political Philosophy
The White House as Animal Farm
As George Orwell’s Animal Farm closes, the revolutionary pigs have been transformed into oppressive humans. It took some time to occur on the Animal Farm. It’s taken just a few months in the Obama White House.
President Barack Obama is morphing into George W. Bush, as administration attorneys repeatedly adopt the executive-authority and national-security rationales that their Republican predecessors preferred.
In courtroom battles and freedom-of-information fights from Washington, D.C., to California, Obama’s legal arguments repeatedly mirror Bush’s: White House turf is to be protected, secrets must be retained and dire warnings are wielded as weapons.
“It’s putting up a veritable wall around the White House, and it’s so at odds with Obama’s campaign commitment to more open government,” said Anne Weismann, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a legal watchdog group.
Certainly, some differences exist.
The Obama administration, for instance, has released documents on global warming from the Council on Environmental Quality that the Bush administration sought to suppress. Some questions, such as access to White House visitor logs, remain a work in progress.
On policies that are at the heart of presidential power and prerogatives, however, this administration’s legal arguments have blended into the other. The persistence can reflect everything from institutional momentum and a quest for continuity to the clout of career employees.
“There is no question that there are (durable) cultures and mindsets in agencies,” Weismann acknowledged.
Conservatives once opposed executive aggrandizement. Then with George W. Bush in office, they embraced the idea of the presidency as a kind of elective monarchy. With President Barack Obama now pushing the executive power grab, will conservatives rediscover their inner-Constitution and again join the barricades for liberty?
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties
Cultwatch: Union Station, New York Times
Snapped this pic at DC’s Union Station this afternoon, on my way from the Amtrak platform to the Metro (where the machine dispensed a metrocard featuring a grinning BHO). Readers planning to visit DC will be happy to know that you can get all your Obama-related tchotchkes and talismans in one convenient locale right after you get off the train.
Say what you will about hapless Jerry Ford, but he had this going for him: nobody ever thought of making an action figure in his image.
In other cult-related news, today’s New York Times has an “Op-Extra” sidebar,with “excerpts from Opinion Online.” Our friend Judith Warner, last seen discussing cougar fantasies about “sex with the president,” weighs in about the shirtless Obama cover on the current Washingtonian:
“Just as having a president who can string a sentence together with subject-verb agreement makes us all look a little bit smarter, just as having a really admirable family in the White House makes us all seem a little less dysfunctional, perhaps having a president who can look good in a bathing suit is in some bizarre way good for the nation.”
Yeah, I mean, God knows it’s been good for Russia.
Counterterrorism, Torture, and the Law
Over at The Wall Street Journal, Cong. Peter Hoekstra calls for an investigation into “what the Obama administration may be doing to endanger the security our nation has enjoyed because of interrogations and other antiterrorism measures implemented since Sept. 12, 2001.” Hoekstra implies, or at least clearly believes, that Obama’s renunciation of torture has made the country less safe. Rest assured, when the next attack occurs (and there will be another attack), Hoekstra and other supporters of torture will claim vindication, even though they won’t be able to point to direct evidence that torture would have averted the attack. It is equally impossible to prove a negative — why something does not occur — as it is to prove that an action not taken in the past would have prevented something in the present.
Similarly, former Vice President Cheney claims that the use of techniques such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions, and cramped confinement enabled the U.S. government to stop future terrorist attacks, and he has asked the Obama administration to declassify the documents that supposedly prove it. Cheney has previously said that President Obama’s renunciation of torture increases the likelihood that future attacks will be successful.
Of course, Cheney has not asked for the declassification of all information obtained by torture. He presumably doesn’t want the American people to know the countless false positives, the fake leads, the purely bogus information offered up by those being tortured in a vain attempt to halt — or merely postpone — their severe discomfort. (Gene Healy documents a few of these in his recent column.)
Nor can Cheney or Hoekstra prove that the few kernels of useful information obtained under torture could only have been acquired under torture, and not by other techniques, techniques that were consistent with our laws, and that we employed in past conflicts. They can’t prove such claims, because they aren’t true.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
Sanford Rejects Faustian Bargain
Yesterday, as expected, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford became the first governor to reject some of his state’s share of stimulus funds, spurning $700 million (of the about $8 billion headed his way) that he said would harm his state’s residents in the long run. South Carolina’s General Assembly (controlled by Republicans who have long opposed Sanford’s attempts to cut spending, lower taxes, and generally reform government operations), using a provision of the stimulus bill inserted by Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), nevertheless plans to seek the funds without the governor’s support. They cite section 1607 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which provides that, notwithstanding a requirement for gubernatorial certification of a request for funds:
If funds provided to any State in any division of this Act are not accepted for use by the Governor, then acceptance by the State legislature, by means of the adoption of a concurrent resolution, shall be sufficient to provide funding to such State.
The question arises, setting aside the relative merits of both sides’ positions, whether the governor (or someone else) could challenge this “alternative certification” provision on constitutional grounds. Here are some initial thoughts:
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