There are legions of senators and representatives back home campaigning for re-election this week who are beginning to hear from constituents that have read the 442-page monster of an emergency Wall Street bailout bill Congress approved last week. It is becoming clear that once again, our representatives voted blindly and in a rush on a massive tome of a bill, and thus endorsed some embarrassing provisions that will inflict serious harm on constitutional liberty and the national economy if they aren’t soon repealed.

There will undoubtedly be more such discoveries, but for now consider just these two. First, Section 109 of the bailout law grants the Secretary of the Treasury the authority to negate private mortgage contracts that were lawfully entered into by all parties. This “foreclosure mortgage mitigation” authority includes ordering “term extensions, rate reductions, principal write downs, increases in the proportion of loans within a trust or other structure allowed to be modified, or removal of other limitation on modification.”  Section 110 of the law gives similar authority to other federal agencies. In other words, because a comparatively few buyers signed onto mortgages they didn’t fully understand, federal bureaucrats have been given the power to rewrite certain kinds of mortgages. Sure, the power is qualified now, but it won’t be long before bureaucrats discover millions more mortgages they think ought to be changed. Then it will be auto loans, home improvement loans, corporate expansion financing and so on and so on.