Going After AIG Could Violate Constitution Clause Prohibiting Bills of Attainder

If your high school government teacher did his/her job, you learned that the Constitution prohibits bills of attainder. 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. Bills of attainder are forbidden by Article I, section 9, clause 3 of the United States Constitution.

The Democrats in Congress are now upset that the money that they gave AIG was used to provide bonus' for executives, and are going to be introducing legislation in Congress soon that will target these specific executives for punishment. As Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill wrote:

Legislation Will be introduced in the next 48 hours or so that will tax these companies and the bonus recipients. The tax will be aimed at executives at companies that have received significant taxpayer assistance through the TARP funds and will recover almost all of these funds for taxpayers. I feel better. We are taking action. It’s time we right this wrong on behalf of hard working Americans everywhere.

In other words, our government is targeting persons or groups of persons, declaring them guilty of a crime (giving out a retention bonus agreed on in contracts), and punishing them by taxing them to reacquire the money that Congress gave them. Doing this, which even though I'm no lawyer, appears to violate the Constitution, makes her 'feel better.'

Things are spiraling out of control very quickly now, and you can pick virtually any clause in the Constitution, no matter how obscure, and I bet the Democrats are at work right now trying their best to violate it. I'm not happy about executives getting a bonus during these tight times, especially when they may have played negative role in their business, but I still believe in a limited government. Democrats apparently don't, and if they don't believe in those ideas in the Declaration of Independence, you have to wonder what other ideas in the Declaration do they not believe in.

More on the legality of a legislative bill that would tax the AIG executives bonus' can be found at The Heritage Foundation's website.

UPDATE: If you were expecting the Congress to respect the Constitution or the Courts to step in and make sure we are still following the Constitution, prepare to be disappointed. Apparently, contemporary legal minds trained in our top law schools now feel that the national government does have the power to single out groups of people it doesn't like and tax them money they earned in the past because it doesn't like them. For more details evaluating the legal arguments here, I direct you to The Volokh Conspiracy and this post.