Does it matter if bailouts are illegal?

Thanks to FW for pointing out the latest threat to the rule of law. Consider this:

The Bush Administration is planning to use money from the $700 billion financial system bailout for an auto industry bailout. To do that, it is seizing on the fact that the bailout statute contains a very broad definition of “financial institution,” which the Administration claims includes virtually any institution, financial or not. The bailout statute defines “financial institutions” eligible for the bailout as ”any institution, including, but not limited to, any bank, savings association, credit union, security broker or dealer, or insurance company.” Never mind that Congress listed as examples of ”financial institutions” only entities that were banks, insurance companies, or financial institutions, not automakers.

The Heritage Foundation and Michelle Malkin have made a strong argument that this violates the financial bailout statute under the principle of statutory construction known as ejusdem generis, which says that when a term’s definition includes examples that are all of a similar kind, it limits the meaning of the term to things similar in kind to such examples.
But if that’s not so, and the bailout was just a big slush fund for the Administration to dispense with as it chooses, then the bailout law itself was unconstitutional, since it conferred unbridled discretion in the hands of the President to do whatever he wanted with it.

We will seemingly do ANYTHING to keep up our prosperity. We will not let our other beliefs (as in the ostensibly free market Republicans coming up with these ideas) stand in the way. Isn’t this Mammon worship on a mammoth scale?