Marcy’s got some great points in her critique of John Cole’s response to my post, with an additional detail I hadn’t considered: that one reason to deal with this at a national level, potentially with a moratorium, is that the banksters are going to inevitably come by when their institutions collapse due to lawsuits and demand another bailout:

This may well be catastrophic whether or not there’s a moratorium on foreclosures until such time as people start admitting what’s going on.

If that’s true (and as I said, I don’t really know, but that seems to be the obvious implication of all the fraud that was going on), then the question is, which catastrophe is going to be least bad for the American people? And which catastrophe best preserves the rule of law and property–the bedrocks of our country? Do we enter this catastrophe on the banksters’ terms, or on more equalized terms?

She also neatly addresses Cole’s plaintive cry for authority in dealing with this problem by mentioning Alan Grayson’s idea, which I had read about but forgotten, actually:

And then there’s the issue of the President’s authority to do something about this. As DDay suggested, there’s the possibility that the regulators (Office of Thrift Supervision or Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, for example) would impose a moratorium. Or, as Alan Grayson has requested, the government could (and probably should) declare this a systemic risk, which gives them the authority under Dodd-Frank to do what they need to do to protect our system. That doesn’t make it legally or (especially) politically easy to declare a moratorium (as the deepwater drilling Obama imposed makes clear). But once you regard this as an issue that may affect securitized mortgages more generally (and not just some foreclosures), then the claim that this may be systemic seems fair.

Yes, I’d say that Bank of America going belly-up constitutes systemic risk, not to mention a more-than-likely outcome of this debacle, at least, if we decide to look at their obligations honestly, unlike during TARP/the stress tests/etc. Witness how they have to provide, in essence, their own title insurance now. Insuring.. against themselves… to try and keep themselves in business.

Honestly, who’s going to fall for that?

The debate is thus less about whether a collapse is going to happen and more about how to steer it to crush the fewest people. Call me crazy, but I put our odds of getting through this as slightly better if a single national authority does the talking rather than 50 disparate state governments.

Democrats claimed that Fin-Reg would protect the system from another collapse; here’s their chance to cough up some proof.

I swear, I was going to start a new policy of not talking about Balloon Juice stuff here, at least for a while, but this is just staggeringly dumb.

If our readers understand the title problem correctly, and I have no reason to think otherwise, foreclosures will probably grind to a halt for a while. Maybe a long while. It seems to depend on whether Congress can start writing ex post facto laws that apply to property rights. Maybe they can (it seems like they just tried), but that is a pretty central component of our whole democratic experiment. Imagine a Kelo decision that hoses two thirds of Americans who own a house. Or their lenders! Someone will pay for Goldman’s screwup, and few outside the head injury recovery ward expect it to be Goldman.

Err, no. No, no, no, no.

Congress absolutely cannot pass ex-post facto laws. This is very simple. Article 1, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution expressly and absolutely forbids doing so:

No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

See how easy that is? It’s one frikkin sentence.

And no, the recent e-notarization law was not an ex-post facto law. It would have affected the way notarizations are treated going forward, and that might have made it hard to prove that fraud occurred, giving an out of state/e-notary’s virtual stamp way too much credibility. That is not at all the same thing as passing a law that says something which was legal when you did it is now a crime, was a crime when you did it, and now you’re in big trouble, Mister.

Further, it’s not necessary that they pass some magical ex-post facto law. All the stuff that we’ve been talking about? False affadavits, fraudlent notarizations, cheating investors and Fannie and Freddie and such? Already against the rules. We don’t need a moratorium because it wasn’t illegal to do most of this shit (and the stuff that might not be illegal per se carried heavy financial penalties); we need a moratorium to stop the fraud mills from doing further damage until we can figure out who goes to jail, who goes bankrupt, and how we keep the rest of the banksters from doing this again in the future.

Then there was this gem:

Imagine it’s 2013 and a federal judge somewhere declares the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act unconstitutional. Imagine further that a group of Senators ask President Palin not to appeal the ruling. If she instructed Attorney General Christine O’Donnell not to appeal the ruling, would that be OK?

If it isn’t, then it’s not OK for the Obama administration to skip the appeal of the recent ruling against DADT.

First, Obamacare is unconstitutional. It goes light-years beyond Kelo, taking private assets without due process and handing them to murderous thugs in the insurance lobby, who provide no useful service in return. Nobody has ever done direct taxation for a private entity before; the IRS has never been a private bill collector before. This is bold, dangerous new corporatist territory.

Second, err, yeah, it would be ‘Ok’ for the Attorney General to decline appealing it. In that AGs have that authority; not every case gets appealed to the Supreme Court.

Nice to see once again how Good Liberals view gay rights though. Your fundamental standing as a human being is basically of the same value as a shitty high-deductible, bargain-basement insurance plan from Aetna.

What’s the co-pay on civil rights, anyway?

I’m going to go pick on someone else now.

The Obama administration has decided to appeal two cases that struck down part of the odious Defense of Marriage Act today.

Having absolutely no sense of shame, the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division then went to speak at an LGBT event in Cleveland later in the afternoon, speaking on what a great thing it was that the DOJ would be looking out for gay rights. I am seriously not making that up.

Within hours of the filing of the notices of appeal, the head of the DOJ Civil Rights Division, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez, spoke at the LGBT Heritage Day Celebration in Cleveland, Ohio.

Focusing primarily on the importance of enforcement of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act to DOJ’s mission, Perez did not mention the DOMA cases or the challenge to the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in his remarks.

I can’t imagine why he would have thought it’d be awkward to go to an LGBT rally and talk about how your department is protecting a law to screw gay people out of equal rights under the law.

The gay community isn’t taking this sort of thing lying down though; witness the truly impressive protest by GetEQUAL recently.

Adding insult to injury: in order to avoid having a discharged gay soldier inside at the big fundraiser GetEQUAL was protesting, the DCCC returned his check and barred him from attendance.

That’s right; they’re so committed to avoiding dealing with this issue that they turned down a 5k check from a gay war veteran, and former Democratic Congressional candidate no less.

Yessir, President Fierce Advocate is on the case.