AIG Tax is a Bill of Attainder
This week, the House of Representatives shocked me. Admittedly, I’m pretty jaded. The whole scandal over AIG bonuses being handed out despite the fact that the government taxpayers were bailing them out didn’t phase me in the least. In fact, I was amused that people wanted to run the AIG scoundrels out of town on rails, when any parent could tell you that rewarding bad behavior only encourages more bad behavior.
But then, when Congress decided to respond to public outcry, and the bill for a 90% tax on the bonuses recieved by AIG and other bailout companies passed, I was stunned. My first thought was, Can we be any more corrupt? Obviously we can, and we’re getting there fast. My second thought was remembering that kind of action is forbidden pretty early on in the Constitution, right?
Easy enough to find. From Article 1, Section 9: No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
For a while there, I was having trouble finding other people similarly outraged. Instead the masses seemed in approval of this, and my head kept spinning. I just KNEW I hadn’t lit up my crackpipe Thursday. Now, it seems that awareness (and disapproval) is catching up as the ramifications of punitive after-the-fact taxation suddenly dawn on the public. Jay Leno even mentioned it when he interviewed President Obama, but of course, the President’s comment that his bowling was “like the Special Olympics or something” caught much more attention.
Yesterday, MSNBC asked, “Is that AIG tax constitutional?” Apparently some people think it is, but thankfully the bill has the Senate to travel through first. Let’s hope our Senate behaves more responsibly than the House did.
Update: First thing this morning, I read that President Obama agrees with me about the nature of the bill that passed the House. I’ll be interested to see the Senate version.
We’re at a very dangerous time. I know that the country has been through similar shifts (Johnson’s “War on Poverty” comes to mind), and worked through it. I keep thinking about our discussion over this weekend, when you were talking about Tocqueville’s quote – “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” That scares me.
[...] Man getting you down? With all the demands for government to just take over control of banks, and unconstitutional Bills of Attainder and whatnot, I’m getting a little anxious, just a little bit [...]