The Unconstitutional Bailout

The amount of money being thrown around by one person - Hank Paulson - described in the previous post really got me thinking about this George Will article from last week on how the bailout is unconstitutional. Essentially, Will argues that the "non-delegation doctrine" (which prevents one branch from abdicating it's power to another) prevents Congress from telling Hank Paulson to exercise powers that fundamentally belong to Congress. The law in this area is pretty lenient - which has allowed the huge growth in administrative agencies under Executive branch power - because Congress must only give an "intelligible principle" to the Agency being delegated power. Although courts rarely, if ever, find there's no intelligible principle it really makes you wonder what is the intelligible principle in this case: "grow the economy?" "fix it?" "run wild?"