Glenn Greenwald is rather talking past David Brooks' point today. The argument is not that those in positions of economic management have changed, but that the power of the economic managers has magnified. In the last month, Treasury Secretary has transformed from a quiet cabinet position to an appointment that's arguably above Secretary of State. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve has gone from an administrator of interest rates to a direct actor in mergers, bailouts, and credit markets. Congress and the president have both fallen far back, content, at least over the past few weeks, to cede extraordinary authority to a rapid response team of economic bureaucrats. Someone made the point to me recently that when the economy is good, no one knows who the Treasury Secretary or the Chairman of the Federal Reserve is. When the economy is bad, a fair portion of the country knows not only their name, but their face. Hank Paulson is, today, a celebrity. A month ago, he was unrecognizable. The question that isn't really addressed in Brooks' column is whether this is the new normal, or a temporary anomaly. Chris Dodd and Barney Frank seem determined to assert a role for Congress in the response to this crisis, and Paulson and Bernanke look -- at least for the moment -- to be accepting the legitimacy of that demand. But the power of the Treasury Secretary will, in large part, depend on the language of the bailout bill. If Paulson had passed his version, which stated that "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," we'd be in a whole new world. Dodd and Frank have the power and the votes to replace that line with something else. But the question of whether we're entering a period of progressive corporatism in which a small group of private elites use the power of government to run the economy will, in large part, be dependent on what replaces that clause.
