Campbell: Congress "Victim of a Bait and Switch" on TARP
In the course of the interview, senatorial candidate Tom Campbell said 3 other things that surprised me:
1) On trade: I asked the famously free-trade Campbell whether he thought there might be any case for trade sanctions against a country like China that persistently under-valued its currency. Campbell answered - these are from my shorthand, so please note they are not verbatim replies - that the WTO did not regard monetary policy as a legal basis for compensatory tariffs. But in his opinion that was a mistake in the law. Economically, sanctions against a country that persistently under-valued its currency are justified, and he would be open to them as a legislator if a legal framework for them could be found.
2) Campbell's libertarianism makes him a reluctant interventionist. He had opposed the Kosovo war, for example, denouncing it as an illegal violation of the War Powers Act. I asked him whether he would have supported the president's decision to send additional troops to Afghanistan. He said he would. Afghanistan was a war already under progress, he said, and the legislature should not second-guess the military judgments of the commander-in-chief about the resources required.
3) Campbell spoke with intense anger about the administration's TARP program. Facing a collapse of the U.S. banking system in October 2008, the right response Campbell said was the same as Nixon's response to the Arab attack on Israel in 1973: "Send everything." But in the subsequent months, the program has shifted purpose, and now threatens to shift purpose again, as a source of administration financing for job-creation projects. These shifts violated congressional intent. Congress, Campbell said, was entitled to feel it had been the "victim of a bait and switch."