The bigger issue is that the bill effectively creates protections not just for the Treasury, but for the executives on Wall Street who created this near Armageddon. Mr. Rosner says that the draft bill “prevents judicial review that could allow the protection of decisions that create false marks, hide prior marks, or could be used to prevent civil or criminal prosecution in situations where a management knowingly provided false marks that aided the growth of this crisis of confidence.”

False marks  using mark-to-market accounting to hide the true value of security, rather than disclose it honestly  has a lot to do with why Jeffrey Skilling, the former Enron chief executive, is in jail.

Image Last week, Hugo Chávez, the president of Venezuela, gave a speech in which he marveled at the size of the financial bailout. Credit... Thomas Coex/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

It is absolutely true, of course, that Mr. Paulson needed to do something. By Thursday afternoon, less than 48 hours after the bailout of the American International Group, the financial system was near meltdown. The mere rumor that Mr. Paulson and the Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke were devising a big bailout fund cause the stock market to soar.

In truth, I’m not sure I agree with Mr. Rosner’s assessment of Mr. Paulson’s job performance. I think he is one of the most competent Treasury secretaries we’ve ever had, and it is hard to imagine anyone else handling this crisis any better. His predecessors, who lacked his grounding in the world of high finance, would most likely have been like deer in headlights.

And when Mr. Paulson says, as he did on all the talk shows on Sunday, “I hate the fact that we have to do it, but it’s better than the alternative,” I believe him. (It would have looked better, of course, if he had come up with this plan before it looked as if his former firm, Goldman Sachs, was in jeopardy.)

But the question on the table now is whether the government’s latest response to this crisis  the way it has been constructed, and frankly, the way it is being crammed down everyone’s throat at the eleventh hour  is the right approach. Already the market has its doubts; just look at its performance on Monday.