Al Franken, Sovereign Immunity, and Healthcare

TheHill.com has noticed that Al Franken (D-MN) has wornout his welcome and started "to show the sharp-tongued side of his personality by ripping into GOP staffers behind the scenes." Franken's a little man on a vendetta against the opposition's underlings. Whatever.

I found other revelations of in that article more interesting. Franken believes (as do I) that victims of rape or sexual assault should be able to sue in court. He introduced a measure that would require defense contractors to recognize that:

[Franken's anti-rape] measure barred the government from doing business with contractors
that required employees to settle rape and sexual assault charges through arbitration instead of the courts.

Followers of this blog are aware that I want congress to waive sovereign immunity in the healthcare bill. My reasoning is the same as Franken's: someone denied coverage by a government bureaucracy should have the opportunity to argue their case in a court of law. This need is underscored by the fact that Medicare denies claims at a higher rate than do insurance companies. Will Franken push to waive sovereign immunity or will he condemn us all to a world of death panel arbitration?

Sovereign Immunity for Treasury Incorporated

Via Instapundit, J. W. Verret at The Volokh Conspiracy examines Treasury Incorporated:

To sum up my position: the theory and practice of corporate and securities law are unprepared for the presence of a control shareholder, like the government, that also enjoys sovereign immunity from the federal securities laws and state corporation law.

The legal principal of sovereign immunity evolved at a time when governments were much smaller and un-intrusive. As in healthcare, significant legal problems are created in corporate law by an immune shareholder.

Also of interest from Verret's article:

...if I can establish that the government controls merely the five bailed-out companies in which it has the largest stake (Fannie, Freddie, AIG, Citigroup, Bank of America) then under private sector accounting principles and under government accounting rules (and in these strange times, who knows which is which?) we are currently failing to recognize roughly HALF of the real national debt and HALF of the real budget deficit...