Flat out, and he uses the “L” word, he quotes David Davies, and notes that “Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.”:

So, this morning Hank Paulson told a whopper:

We gave you a simple, three-page legislative outline and I thought it would have been presumptuous for us on that outline to come up with an oversight mechanism. That’s the role of Congress, that’s something we’re going to work on together. So if any of you felt that I didn’t believe that we needed oversight: I believe we need oversight. We need oversight.

What the proposal actually did, of course, was explicitly rule out any oversight, plus grant immunity from future review:

Sec. 8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

He’s right too. Paulson wants no oversight as he bails out his buddies.