This is the Cater Daily Podcast for Tuesday, January 5, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Congress passed the bank bailout more than a year ago, and since then we've learned that most of it was an abdication of responsibility.

Instead of suspiciously eyeing all aspects of the legislation and demanding congressional oversight for how TARP funds were spent, Congress

handed a huge amount of power and money with precious little oversight over to the White House.

John Samples, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Representative Government,

is author of the forthcoming paper, TARP, a case study in congressional failure.

What I've done is looked at not TARP so much but how Congress worked with TARP and brought it about

and I've looked at it from a constitutional point of view.

That is, Congress is supposed to be a strong part of the government.

It's supposed to balance the executive and so on.

What I found was that none of this happened that Congress performed miserably with TARP and not just

on the basis that it was a bad policy, but it didn't do any of the things it was supposed to do

to make good policy under the Constitution.

Now essentially one of the, I mean there's a couple of strange things here.

I found for example that this wasn't exactly a case of executive branch officials being

ambitious and wanting to take power.

Ben Bernanke said at a crucial point last summer, you know I think I'm at the extent of my legal

power here. I think we have to go to Congress and get some authorization for this.

So in a sense, Benaki was sort of acting like a person acting within a constitutional framework,

that he had some sense of the constraints of his own power.

So they went to Congress.

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