The Wardman Wire

Somebody in the US Congress is “Up” themselves. From Quando.net via the Adam Smith Institute: the US House of Representative has decided to treat OPEC as if it were a domestic company:

The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation on Tuesday allowing the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies and working together to set crude prices, but the White House threatened to veto the measure.

The bill would subject OPEC oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, to the same antitrust laws that U.S. companies must follow.

The measure passed in a 324-84 vote, a big enough margin to override a presidential veto.

The legislation also creates a Justice Department task force to aggressively investigate gasoline price gouging and energy market manipulation.

“This bill guarantees that oil prices will reflect supply and demand economic rules, instead of wildly speculative and perhaps illegal activities,” said Democratic Rep. Steve Kagen of Wisconsin, who sponsored the legislation.

So much for national sovereignty. The phrase “category error” springs to mind.

A commenter writes over at Coyote Blog:

I don’t understand how this would work, exactly. Wouldn’t these foreign nations have to voluntarily submit themselves to U.S. jurisdiction?

Congress don’t either, and I don’t think that “working” is what this is about.

They are simply a bit too far “up themselves”, but voluntary self-submission to US jurisdiction without any evidence would be the New Labour approach:

“As recently as December 2003 Baroness Scotland admitted that the Act introduced an imbalance in extradition procedures between the UK and the US. She told the Lords committee in December 2003 that, “When we make extradition requests to the United States we shall need to submit sufficient evidence to establish ‘probable cause’. That is a lower test than prima facie but a higher threshold than we ask of the United States, and I make no secret of that.”

Abortion balls of the week tomorrow … maybe.