Wonder of wonders: the Democratic Congress proposes to live up to its oversight role even though the potential oversightee is a popular Democratic President.
A congressional oversight committee opened an investigation yesterday into whether the Obama administration is circumventing a law that limits lavish pay for executives at firms benefiting from the $700 billion federal bailout.
Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner asking for records on any special entities that the government believes it can use to funnel bailout money without requiring firms to abide by congressional restrictions.
“It would be unconscionable and irresponsible for the Treasury Department to permit excessive pay practices to continue at companies that have been rescued by the taxpayers,” Towns wrote in the letter. “I will strongly oppose any attempt to weaken or bypass these restrictions, or to violate the spirit, if not the intent, of these laws.”
The investigation comes two days after The Washington Post reported that the administration has engineered new bailout programs in a way that it believes will allow firms benefiting from the initiatives to avoid congressional restrictions that curb executive pay and require companies to turn over ownership stakes to the government.
The quaint Republican notion that Congress should exercise oversight only over an opposite party president, but rubber-stamp a same-party president does not seem to have infected the Democrats.
Maybe this has something to do with the relative brain chemistry of liberals versus those who bastardize the word conservative by calling themselves conservatives? Because a similar pattern of partisan blindness on the right, and non-partisan objectivity on the left, evidences itself in blogs, for example.
That “Thank Gods!” in the title is pretty heartfelt, by the way. Since the Republicans don’t seem to have any interest whatsoever in any meaningful oversight, it’s a relief that Democrats are equal to the task of policing their own government.