Washington is easily distracted, and the Blagojevich Whitewater parallels are nothing if not distracting. So the auto bailout is moving slowly - though the House just said yes, this thing was supposed to be done on Monday. Still, there's more legal issues to think about. It's a big subsidy, and subsidies are subject to WTO discipline - discipline that no one may sue over, given the big subsidies other countries have been giving to their own auto manufacturers. But the constitutional issues are still there - here's Andrew Grossman with the outlines of how you might get a takings claim out of the plan, and Thom Lambert has a more general anti-industrial policy take. The takings claim is based on the super senior position the government would take - and if that's a taking for this, it must be for AIG and the bank bailouts. Heck, one would imagine plenty of contract claims for the private debt offerings made so far, so I wonder if the silence on that front is suggestive.
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