Puerto Rico Ping! Please Freepmail me if you want on or off the list.
Posted on 10/15/2019 8:39:38 AM PDT by cll
Amid a spiraling economic crisis in Puerto Rico, Congress established a control board to impose outside discipline. The Supreme Court on Tuesday will consider the board’s constitutionality in a case that ostensibly pits Congress’s plenary authority over U.S. territories against the Appointments Clause. Yet there is no real constitutional conflict between the two.
Congress in 2016 enacted a law known as Promesa establishing a seven-member board modeled on Washington, D.C.’s financial control board of the 1990s. Promesa allows the board to oversee fiscal decisions and established a bankruptcy-like mechanism that authorized the board to restructure $70 billion in debt and $50 billion in pension obligations.
The hedge fund Aurelius, which owns Puerto Rican bonds, argues that the board violates the Appointments Clause requiring “officers of the United States” to be appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate. Promesa allowed the President to appoint members from a list of nominations by the House Speaker (2), Senate Majority Leader (2), House Minority Leader (1) and Senate Minority Leader (1). The President could choose the seventh, and none of the members have to be confirmed by the Senate.
According to Aurelius, the board vitiates constitutional protections that safeguard liberty and prevent abuses of power. But members of the D.C. control board weren’t confirmed by the Senate. And Article IV grants Congress “power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations” for territories. Congress can structure territorial governments as it chooses.
For instance, the Northwest Ordinance of 1789 provided for a territorial legislature with one house that was popularly elected and another comprised of appointees chosen by the President from lists proposed by the elected house and confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
The Court has long held that the Constitution’s structural safeguards including the Appointments Clause...
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Puerto Rico Ping! Please Freepmail me if you want on or off the list.
I don’t think the $70 billion, or $92 billion quoted elsewhere, has been spent.
Those amounts are promised, perhaps even allocated, but, they haven’t been spent yet I read somewhere (can’t remember when or where) that only about $13 billion have been spent.
There may still be time to make sure the funding is spent wisely and where needed, and that the crooks have nothing to do with it.
This is where the hurricane money is, is going and where’s it’s coming from:
To the top far right is the English language link>
So, I was right.
The vast majority of the funding has not been spent.
Still time to get things done right, other than what’s been spent already.
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