Asian Conservatives

There has been a lot of interest in the constitutionality of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (EESA) and the TARP funds. I see a lot of Internet searches about this. George Will has a very good piece in the Washington Post about this topic:

By enacting it, Congress did not in any meaningful sense make a law. Rather, it made executive branch officials into legislators. Congress said to the executive branch, in effect: “Here is $700 billion. You say you will use some of it to buy up banks’ ‘troubled assets.’ But if you prefer to do anything else with the money — even, say, subsidize automobile companies — well, whatever.”

FreedomWorks, a Washington-based libertarian advocacy organization, argues that EESA violates “the nondelegation doctrine.” Although the text does not spell it out, the Constitution’s logic and structure — particularly the separation of powers — imply limits on the size and kind of discretion that Congress may confer on the executive branch.

One of the beauties of the U.S. Constitution is separation of the three branches of power: Executive, Legislative, and Judicial. With EESA, Congress is giving the president unconstitutional powers by allowing him to write the specifics of the law, i.e. how the money is to be appropriated. That should be Congress’ job!

Taxpaying citizens like you and I ought to be enraged by this! It’s evident that we have a lazy Congress bowing to the demands of a fear-mongering President. And now the next two or more generations of Americans are to pay for the astronomical debt — bought up by the billions by Communist China. The consequences of ignoring the Constitution is grave…