Over at Balkinization, Jack Balkin has a very interesting post on the bailout plan. While I disagree strongly with parts of the post, I tend to agree with this part of it:

[T]he Administration now asks for enormous new powers to run the economy in a form of state planning that would make Friedrich Hayek turn over in this grave . . . In the latest version of its plan, the Secretary of the Treasury is given authority to take 700 billion dollars (that's 700,000,000,000) from the federal budget and spend it pretty much however he likes, free from any oversight requirements or restrictions that apply to public contracts and especially free from any form of judicial review. . . .

Put differently, the Administration wants the Secretary to take over a sizable chunk of the nation's capital and insurance markets, and run them as a firm. It is a merger of public power and private capital that would have made a 1930s advocate of state corporatism proud. And because the Secretary's power is effectively unreviewable, he can make sweetheart deals with any or all of the firms and financiers that got us into this mess, providing handsome compensation packages to outgoing executives or, in the alternative, bring these failures into the government to run the new grand public/private business . . .

But there is more. The current secretary of the Treasury will soon be gone, replaced by the appointee of a new Administration, run either by McCain or by Obama. The next President-- and the next Secretary of the Treasury-- will face the very same temptations. If you think that the current Administration will behave itself appropriately-- a dubious proposition given its history-- do you have any guarantee that the next Administration will be equally well behaved?

It's worth pointing out that the bailout plan does have one important check: The power sunsets after 2 years. But 2 years is a lot of time.