Clinton still delivered policy for Lay:
...In the 1990s, Enron was rapidly expanding, especially overseas. The managers of Enron wanted to set up partnerships and to shift debt off its books into foreign operations. (When these partnerships and the hidden debts came to light late last year, Enron's share price collapsed and the company sought bankruptcy protection.) Their efforts to set up the partnerships, however, ran up against certain parts of the Investment Company Act of 1940.
In 1996 Enron tried to get Congress to grant it an exemption from the 1940 law. Congress refused to do so. Enron essentially lost a political struggle in Congress with the Investment Company Institute, the main trade association of the mutual-fund industry.
If the non-delegation part of the American Constitution still restrained the federal government, Enron's loss in Congress would have been the end of the story. There would have been no exemption for Enron from the Investment Company Act. Without the exemption, one of Enron's lawyers told the New York Times, there would have been no partnerships and no debt off the books in the foreign operations.
But the story did not end with Congress. Enron was determined to get the exemption from the Investment Company Act. They learned that the Securities and Exchange Commission, an executive branch agency, had the right to grant an exemption from the Act. Of course, the SEC could grant that exemption because Congress had delegated such authority to the agency.
Enron hired a former director of the investment-management division of the SEC to lobby the agency for the exemption. In 1997, the agency granted the exemption for Enron's foreign operations. He only needed five paragraphs to override the will of Congress. From a constitutional perspective, an SEC division head, whom no one elected, overruled Congress, who must stand for election by the people....
nationalreview.com
I'm still waiting for Arthur Levitt - SEC head under Clinton - to explain how and why his SEC enabled Enron against Congress's will.
btw, I noticed that FoxNews is doing regular "senile" updates concerning the lies elderly Senator Hollings has been fronting. What an embarrassment. |
