The incredible hulk otherwise known as Henry Paulson has a plan, and it’s a doozy. For a mere $500 billion (and perhaps as much as a trillion) the country can buy its way out of economic disaster. Certainly that ratchets up George W. Bush’s advice to go shopping after the terrorist attacks of 2001.

My congressman, Democrat Charles Rangel, spent two hours on the phone with Paulson talking about legislation that will come before the House Ways and Means Committee, which he chairs. He discusses the conversation in today’s New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/20/nyregion/20about.html?scp=1&sq=Rangel%20Paulson&st=cse

“It ends up, ‘Trust me, it’s the right thing to do. And if you don’t do it, the economy will melt down. Not only do we have to do this, you have to do this next week,’” Rangel said.

Follow up:

Note the shift in pronouns. Rangel, a Korean war veteran under fire for what appear to be minor screw-ups in his personal accounting, now has the economic weight of the global economy on his shoulders.
Worse, says Rangel, “…Hank Paulson is leaving at the end of this year. What are we supposed to do in January? He’s telling us what to do, which may cost us trillions of dollars. What do we say next year? Where’s Paulson? He’s back on Wall Street. There is no one in the administration that we’d trust except Paulson.”

Is this any way to run a government? Should we always legislate at the point of a gun? Of course not. But it’s the way to which we’ve become accustomed since 9/11.

Another Democratic New York Congressman, Jerrold Nadler, told at a meeting I attended not long afterwards of the atmosphere around the passage of the Patriot Act in October 2001. The security bill prepared by the Judiciary Committee on which he sits was thrown out. The Bush administration submitted its own— no amendments allowed. Two copies of the bill were made available for reading three hours before the House vote, yet it passed the House with only 66 members, one of them Nadler, voting against it. In the Senate, only Wisconsin’s Russell Feingold voted nay. Despite its clear threats to our civil liberties, the Patriot Act was reauthorized in 2005 with a only little more opposition. Nadler said no, and, this time, Rangel joined him. Fourteen other senators joined Feingold, but both Senators Barack Obama and John McCain went along.

Then we have the decision to invade Iraq, floated by then defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld on September 11, 2001. (I relied heavily on a grassroots website: http://www.historycommons.org in writing this.) In October 2002, Congress, still chastened by the 9/11 attacks and allegations by the administration that naysayers were unpatriotic, passed a resolution authorizing the president to go to war. The attacks on Baghdad didn’t come until March 19, 2003, and many in Congress would later say they were misled by the administration’s baseless claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. What seems more probable is that the administration’s constant and dishonest conflation of Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, amplified by uncritical media, created a public atmosphere in which most politicians feared to object.

Charlie Rangel always opposed the Iraq war. In today’s interview, he laments that the meltdown in our economy, triggered by the infiltration of unregulated sub-prime mortgages into every segment of the banking community, diverts attention from the ongoing war. “Soldiers in Iraq are not even an afterthought.”

Once again, Congress under great pressure will undertake legislation that will have enormous consequences for years to come. The consensus of the news programs I watched last night suggests that whoever is elected in November will be seriously constrained by these commitments. We can hope Paulson knows what he’s doing, but the law of unintended consequences has not been suspended. He probably will have his way because no one knows what else to do.

David Brooks once again astounded me by claiming that President Bush is looking pretty good in all this. He picked Paulson. after all, and then Brooks repeated the Republican mantra, “The surge is working.”

Frankly, I don’t give a fig for Bush’s reputation, but I do worry that bailouts give Americans false confidence that every sin of omission in the government’s leadership can be fixed by the sudden intervention of someone handpicked by the White House (Paulson, General Petraeus) and infusion of a lot of cash that never seems available for the problems of ordinary Americans. (Think New Orleans even today.)

You’ll be happy to hear that Rangel filed amended tax returns on the $75,000 he earned over 20 years by renting his family home in the Dominican Republic (an average of $3,750 a year, but who’s counting?). The son of an elevator operator, Rangel attended college and law school on the GI bill. He let his wife, Alma, take care of the family finances. Fortunately, he has a much better grasp of macroeconomics, and on Capitol Hill, a huge staff of economically-savvy aides.

Henry Paulson is from another world. His father was a Palm Beach jeweler, and he attended Dartmouth and Harvard Business School. In 2006 when he was appointed treasury secretary, Paulson earned a salary of $38 million as chief executive of Goldman Sachs (now one of two extant U.S. investment banks) and his stock there was worth an estimated $700 million.

Still, Paulson showed a common touch uncommon in the Bush administration, which may be why Rangel trusts him. Upon his appointment, he actually noted the widening gap between the rich and the poor. He said he’d like to shore up Social Security, although he doubted he’d have enough support to get it passed.

In January when Bush goes back to Texas and Paulson returns to Wall Street, Rangel will, Providence providing, still be at work on Capitol Hill. That’s when we’ll have to pick up the pieces and see what we have to work with—and who.

We need a president who understands that democratic government is a shared process, not an opportunity to issue fiats and undercut Congress with signing statements, one who understands that people who disagree bring ideas to the table that might otherwise be overlooked, and one well informed enough to ask the right questions. Even these qualities do not assure we can correct the failings of the past eight years, but without them, our government as we've known it doesn't have a chance.