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.