Posted on 06/13/2009 11:36:54 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Nationalizing General Motors, and part of Chrysler, may or may not turn out to be a good deal for the taxpayers. I have a different concern, though: Was it constitutional?
With hundreds of thousands of jobs on the line, this may seem a churlish question. Then again, the temptation to bend the rules of democracy is always greatest in a crisis. It wasn't so long ago that a president claimed the power to do all sorts of questionable things -- from waterboarding to electronic surveillance -- because the country faced a crisis.
Bailing out Detroit is not in the same category, morally, as torture. Still, a presidential decision to federalize a vast sector of the U.S. economy affects the country's vital interests and, potentially, the rights of its citizens. Such an extraordinary measure should rest on the firmest possible foundation of democratic legitimacy. Does President Obama's rescue of GM and Chrysler meet the test?
The classic statement on such matters comes from Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson's opinion in a case about another crisis-driven assertion of executive power: President Harry S. Truman's seizure of steel mills in 1952. Truman wanted to prevent a strike during the Korean War; the court blocked him. ad_icon
In Jackson's analysis, the president's power is at its "maximum" when he "acts pursuant to an express or implied authorization of Congress." The Obama administration argues that it has such authority today, under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of Oct. 3, 2008. This law established the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), the source of the $30 billion the Obama administration pumped into GM as well as the $8 billion it has committed to Chrysler.
The only problem is that the law doesn't give "express" authority to buy a car company.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Re-writing centuries of bankruptcy law to suit political puposes is unconstitutional?
Gee, what’s next...we should actually ask to see our elected leader’s birth certificates?!
The whole thing was ridiculous...
You just know Obama isn’t going to file to run in several states that now require PROOF.
BTTT
GM is not worth the money that the taxpayers have been made to put into it
In addition, he is using TARP money funds for purposes which is clearly was not authorized to be used for. Obama is committing two crimes in one act.
Interesting that this is in the Washington Post. Sounds like more cracks in the Obama administration are beginning to arise.
The Fuhrer and Gestapo Administration and Congress do not care!!! It’s up to the American people to vote them all out!
Not 100% certain, but it sounds like he was probably talking about the stimulus bill that passed in February, and not the TARP.
For a like reason, I made no reference to the "power to regulate commerce among the several States." I always foresaw that difficulties might be started in relation to that power which could not be fully explained without recurring to views of it, which, however just, might give birth to specious though unsound objections. Being in the same terms with the power over foreign commerce, the same extent, if taken literally, would belong to it.
Yet it is very certain that it grew out of the abuse of the power by the importing States in taxing the non-importing, and was intended as a negative and preventive provision against injustice among the States themselves, rather than as a power to be used for the positive purposes of the General Government, in which alone, however, the remedial power could be lodged.
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_3_commerces19.html
Using TARP money for an auto bailout was not authorized by Congress. It should have been applied only to financial institutions. This was the same argument the Indiana penion funds used. The Supreme Court didn’t want to hear it. I don’t understand why.
Just as they refused to take on the birth certificate issue, just as they refused to examine the Chrysler charade the Supremes will sit on their hands and do nothing while Bam takes the country down the socialistic road.
This must have been written by the only person in DC that cares to ask the question....
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