Yes We Can! (ignore the Constitution)

Today, the House passed a bill imposing a 90% tax on bonuses paid to employees with family incomes above $250,000 at companies that have received at least $5 billion in bailout funding. The bill is retroactive back to January 1, 2009.

This is obviously levied at AIG, since there has been great public outrage over their recently-disclosed $165 million bonuses.

One new point I saw in the article was this gem:

“About 400 AIG employees and future employees received bonuses”

Future employees?!? Those fuckers are paying out bonuses to people who don’t even work for them? These assholes need to die by inches. They are too fucking irresponsible and too fucking impertinent to be allowed to continue polluting our planet. Every fucking dime should be taken away from them before they’re kicked out of their offices. Through the windows.

Now…obviously I agree with the spirit of the penalty tax (and make no mistake, it is a punishment), but there’s just one teeny little problem:

The Constitution forbids it.

Specifically, Article 1; Section 9; clause 3, which states “No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.”

[A bill of attainder is an act of legislature declaring a person or group of persons guilty of some crime and punishing them without benefit of a trial.

An ex post facto law (from the Latin for "after the fact") is a law that retroactively changes the legal consequences of acts committed or the legal status of facts and relationships that existed prior to the enactment of the law. In reference to criminal law, it may criminalize actions that were legal when committed.]

Not a whole lot of wiggle-room there, Congress. While the clauses immediately before and after Clause 3 have an “unless” mitigating their directives, Clause 3 ends with a nice, clear period. You can’t do it.

This hasn’t stopped our public serpents, though. The House passed it 328-93, a similar bill is in the Senate, and Obama has expressed support for "the idea."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Botox) said “"We want our money back now for the taxpayers. It isn't that complicated."

First off, plastic girl, it ain’t your money; it’s ours. Secondly, you only want it back because of the backlash against Congress, which should have been aware of the forthcoming bonuses, but which also stripped out language in the first money-grab bill that would have prevented the bonuses in the first place. You’re trying to save face, which is ironic since your face will be perfectly preserved long after the rest of you has crumbled into dust.

While the House is only stealing 90% of the bonuses, Charles Rangel (D-Ends justify Means), chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said he expected local and state governments to take the remaining 10%. What he’s really saying is that he hopes those levels of Government are as corrupt and punitive as the House is.

This administration is showing absolutely no hesitation in ignoring the Constitution in order to punish a group of people. It only took forty minutes for the House bill to pass. Think they’ll hesitate for one second when it comes to doing anything else they want to do?

As much as I loathe the directors of AIG, I sincerely hope they get a few of their attack lawyers to take this to the Supreme Court.

Everybody who voted for this bill should be stripped of their seat, because they’re too stupid to understand Constitutional limitations. Maybe with 98% of Congress joining the ranks of the unemployed, we’ll make some real progress in fixing this shit.