Journal pudge's Journal: Democrats to Rule of Law: We Still Hate You 10
I don't know a lot about bills of attainder -- it's not something that comes up much -- so I don't have an opinion on whether the bill to tax some bonuses of bailout receipient employees at 90 percent constitutes one.
However, if it is a bill of attainder, it's clearly unconstitutional. No question about that, of course. So I would expect that when people defend this bill against the claim that it is unconstitutional, they would argue that it is not a bill of attainder, because if is, it's illegal. Unfortunately, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) instead argued that it is legal because it's "fair":
I'm prepared to battle in the courts. Why? Because they look at issues of equity. What does equity mean? It means, who's in here with unclean hands? And if there is a situation where they are taking federal money, such as AIG, and all of a sudden they give retention bonuses, our courts will look at this legislation and say it is fair to give the money back to the American people because the circumstances have changed.
It doesn't matter if it is a bill of attainder because it is fair, you see.
This is, of course, the definition of rule of man: igoring the law and doing what individual people think is best. This is not justice. This is not law. As I've mentioned many times, it is the rule of law which protects our rights. If we don't force the government to follow the law, if we allow them to break the law when it "seems" like the right thing to do, then we cannot expect them to follow the law when it comes time to protecting our rights against a majority who would take those rights away.
Again, I take no position whether this is a bill of attainder. I simply bemoan the fact that many of the proponents of this bill don't care whether or not it is, and further, that it doesn't surprise me in the least.
Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.
moo (Score:2)
I don't know much about BoA either.
I was thinking that instead of just having Congress spend money; they should have to wait a little bit of time to do that.
Agree with journal, not title (Score:2)
I'll leave it to A.N.Other to post that cliche Moore quote from 'A Man For All Seasons'.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm more concerned by eroding legal frameworks for mindless populism than by the undeserving getting a fat bonus.
Indeed.
What about the title did you disagree with?
Laws, shmaws, we're better than you! (Score:2)
While I agree on the AIG nonsense, it's not the most egregious example. After all the noise about 'smart diplomacy' and 'unilateralism' and 'international law' over the last 8 years, the Democrats have willfully violated NAFTA with the Mexican trucking thing.
Maybe it's not a rule of law thing, but just that they got mixed up on treating friends like friends, and enemies like enemies.
This thing makes me annoyed (Score:1)
Saying first outright that I'm not impressed by the proposed tax changes to take the bonuses back, I was discussing this with a tax lawyer on another forum and his opinion was that it wasn't a bill of attainder since they have not yet paid taxes on that income and functionally it's no different than any other tax code changes that are enacted in mid 2009 to apply to income made in early 2009 and on taxes filed in 2010.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree with that part, but that means it's not ex post facto in that sense, not that it's not a bill of attainder, which is largely unrelated to the issue of WHEN the law is passed.
An example of a bill of attainder would be: "Bernie Madoff is guilty of massive fraud, therefore we are going to tax everything he owns at 100% as punishment." That's unconstitutional: it identifies an identifiable individual or group, condemns them for wrongdoing, and punishes them for that wrongdoing.
Is this AIG bonus tax the
Re: (Score:1)
I agree--and I also think my lawyer friend must have had a braino when he typed "attainder" instead of "ex post facto".
Re: (Score:2)
It may not be technically ex post facto, but it sure seems like it is ex post facto in spirit. People are being punished for signing contracts that they did under an understood set of circumstances (existing tax law) and being punished by the sudden imposition of a RADICALLY different tax law.
I'm more inclined to think this will all blow over after it has achieved its desired mission of distracting public attention from the even more problematic aspects of the bail-out. The public and the press needed so
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, it kills me that so many Dems say they are "too big to fail," and then say "we should not let them get that big." I wonder how many of them actually think it would have been OK to let them go bankrupt, but wanted to use this to further their socialist agenda of not letting companies get that powerful. Literally, Robert Reich said on Sunday that AIG should not have been allowed to get that big.