In the text of the draft proposal of the bailout plan:
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.
This would be the decisions of current Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and presuming that he didn’t distribute all $700 billion before his replacement took office, some Treasury Secretary to be named later.
The McCain camp’s Rick Davis, on the conference call today: “The solution to a lack of transparency and accountability is not to have an even greater lack of transparency and accountability.”
The New York Times tried to make an issue of Davis doing lobbying for a group called the HomeOwnership Alliance from 2000 to 2005. The HomeOwnership Alliance was a group of 20 organizations that included Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Of course, McCain introduced a bill to reduce the risk Fannie and Freddie posed to taxpayers… back in 2005:
For years I have been concerned about the regulatory structure that governs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–known as Government-sponsored entities or GSEs–and the sheer magnitude of these companies and the role they play in the housing market. OFHEO’s report this week does nothing to ease these concerns. In fact, the report does quite the contrary. OFHEO’s report solidifies my view that the GSEs need to be reformed without delay. I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, to underscore my support for quick passage of GSE regulatory reform legislation. If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole. I urge my colleagues to support swift action on this GSE reform legislation.
So one of McCain’s current staffers was a lobbyist for a group that included FM/FM, and yet during that time, McCain introduced legislation those groups opposed. Has Obama ever proposed a law that his biggest and most well-heeled donors would object to?