Does H.R. 1586 scare you?

Congress passed H.R. 1586 today by an overwhelming majority. This bill would impose a 90% tax on employees who received bonuses from companies that received over $5 billion in bailout money. Does that scare you? It sure scares me. Why does Congress have the power to impose such a high tax on money that was obtained legally? Some might think "well these executives deserve it; they are getting bailout money from the American taxpayers." I agree, they shouldn't have taken the money and should give it back, but allowing Congress to assume such great power to tax as a form of punishment is wrong and unconstitutional.

How is it unconstitutional? I'm no constitutional lawyer, but it seems like an "ex post facto" law which the constitution explicitly prohibits. Also, the constitution prohibits bills of attainder which are "an act of legislature declaring a person or group of persons guilty of some crime and punishing them without benefit of a trial" (from wikipedia).

How should this have been taken care of? If we could go back, we shouldn't have given bailout money to AIG or anyone in the first place. Then the contracts that awarded these executives their bonuses would have been voided when the companies declared bankruptcy. We can't go back and do that, however. So the way I see it is to deny further bailout money to companies and let the market deal with the problem.

What lesson should we take from all this? Most of the liberals in Congress don't really care that taxpayer money is going to these executives. Otherwise they wouldn't have made it legal in the original stimulus bill. They were just looking after their friends (Sen. Dodd, who wrote the exception into the bill received the most campaign money of any politician in 2008; Pres. Obama's friend and envoy was on the board of AIG at the time the bonuses were given out; and the list just goes on). Maybe congressional term limits would be appropriate, or how about we the people just hold those politicians in this mess accountable (i.e. don't vote for them again). I know the congressman from my district (who voted for both the bailout and the new resolution to fix the "accidental" screw-up in the bailout) will not get my vote next time he is up.

Thoughts on RTBA

RTBA (Read the Bills Act) is a grassroots effort to get a bill in Congress that would require a number of interesting things. The conditions in the bill (from their website):

• Each bill, and every amendment, must be read in its entirety before a quorum in both the House and Senate.


• Every member of the House and Senate must sign a sworn affidavit, under penalty of perjury, that he or she has attentively either personally read, or heard read, the complete bill to be voted on.


• Every old law coming up for renewal under the sunset provisions must also be read according to the same rules that apply to new bills.


• Every bill to be voted on must be published on the Internet at least 7 days before a vote, and Congress must give public notice of the date when a vote will be held on that bill.


• Passage of a bill that does not abide by these provisions will render the measure null and void, and establish grounds for the law to be challenged in court.


• Congress cannot waive these requirements.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Maybe a better question is, what would be the result of such a bill? It would definitely make Congress run much slower. Looking back are there any bills/resolutions that Congress has passed quickly that necessarily needed to be passed quickly? If anyone can name one, I'd like to hear of it, because I seriously doubt it.

The one major plus that having this bill as a law that I can see is in the current example of the AIG bonuses. Once the media reported on how millions of bailout dollars were given to AIG executives as bonuses, every politician in Washington was outraged. Did they read the original bill which stated that those bonuses were legal? Probably not. Apparently Sen. Chris Dodd (who received the most money in 2008 from AIG employees) added that stipulation to the bill; now Sen. Dodd is outraged. How convenient! Pres. Obama apparently never read the bill that he signed because he is now outraged that AIG did something that was explicitly legal according to the bill he signed. Maybe it is time for Washington to slow down.