Prosecute Obama's Chrysler Deal Lawyers?

After all: Their legal advice is much more blatantly wrong than anything proposed by George Bush's lawyers on detainee interrogation, or so writes Ann Woolner at Bloomberg.com:

Chrysler is essentially selling itself to itself, says Lynn LoPucki, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He teaches secured transactions and maintains a database of major bankruptcies. So, if the “sale” isn’t a true sale, and if it dictates payout to secured creditors, isn’t that a sub rosa reorganization? If it favors junior creditors over senior creditors, doesn’t it violate the very basics of bankruptcy law? Senior creditors can volunteer to give up some of what’s due them but they can’t be forced to by a bankruptcy court. “Those are property rights, and they are protected by the Constitution,” says Daniel Glosband, a partner in Boston’s Goodwin Procter. “You can’t just take them away.” And yet, it could happen. “There’s an enormous momentum in favor of the government plan,” says Jay Westbrook, who teaches bankruptcy law at the University of Texas. It’s naïve to assume bankruptcy judges feel compelled to follow the law, says LoPucki. He argues that bankruptcy courts across the country compete for the big cases by giving lawyers for major companies what they want. “According to the law, this plan should not be approved,” LoPucki says. Yet he predicts [bankruptcy judge Arthur] Gonzalez will do it anyway to persuade other companies (General Motors Corp. comes to mind) to pick Manhattan’s bankruptcy court over, say Detroit’s. Already the Chrysler case is one for the books. You have the federal government sending a company into bankruptcy court, financing its reorganization, deciding who will get what, setting a strict timetable and urging a judge to blink at the law. If the argument that Chrysler’s welfare is so critical to the national interest that longstanding laws can be ignored, what’s next?

Woolner mischievously ends by answering her own question.

Some future president will find a way to justify blatantly illegal conduct. Such as torture.