Courts Unlikely to Strike Down AIG Tax Law, Legal Experts Say

by Greg Stohr - March 20th, 2009 - Bloomberg News

The House yesterday voted 328-93 in favor of a 90 percent tax on bonuses, including the $165 million insurer AIG paid last week after receiving $173 billion in bailout funds. The Senate plans to vote next week.

The measure raises a number of legal questions, and New Hampshire Republican Senator Judd Gregg yesterday said the legislation was unconstitutional. Still, any legal challenge will meet a significant obstacle: the historic reluctance of the Supreme Court to second-guess Congress on tax issues.

“Given the state of the law, it will be unlikely that the Supreme Court will strike down this legislation,” said Edward McCaffery, a University of Southern California tax-law professor who says he questions the wisdom of the proposal.

Gregg said the legislation would violate the constitutional ban on bills of attainder, or laws that single out individuals for punishment. “It’s basically targeted on a small group of people,” he said.

The House took several steps to shield the measure from that argument, said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School.

Is there anyone in America too stupid to realized who this bill was targeted at? Is it okay to pass a bill clearly targeted at a group like the AIG executives if you "purify" the language to pretend you really meant it to cover a greater group that just happens to include the group that all the legislators were publicly railing against?

What about the whole "ex post facto" thing which is also banned in our Constitution. Our corrupt judges have long since ignored that ... so clearly that "right" will not protect anyone either. In fact, the whole bill of rights thing to protect people from an out of control government has long since been rendered a joke. Today, it is used to protect one group of government favored citizens from other citizens, and is used to crush that second group. So much for protection from government. Our judges are so corrupt, nothing in the Constitution means anything any more.