Penny wise, pound foolish with the Constitution

At least this guy's on the right track...

Harvard professor Laurence Tribe, who advised Obama during the campaign, and he says he’s leaning towards seeing the new House bill to tax back all the AIG bonuses as unconstitutional.

Tribe says the problem with the bill is that the Constitution forbids Congress from enacting a “bill of attainder,” which would essentially “legislate punishment of an identifiable class,” as he put it. Tribe noted that the Supreme Court had used that clause to slap down other laws.

Tribe says the main problem is that it’s hard to make the case that the law isn’t “punitive.”

“Its punitive intent is increasingly transparent,” Tribe says. “when you have Chuck Grassley calling on [executives] to commit suicide, and people responding to pitch fork sentiment, it’s hard to argue that this isn’t an attempt to punish an identifiable set of individuals who are the subject of understandable outrage.”

...the problem is, he doesn't pull the thread far enough. Why are these executives the 'subject of understandable outrage? It's not just that they're being compensated handsomely--Wall Street's been doing that for years, with little groundswell of complaint. So what changed? The fact Uncle Sam poured nearly a trillion dollars of taxpayer money into the financial sector after it immolated itself in bad decisions.

So yes, it's understandable outrage at executives who wrecked their ship, accepted massive amounts of public money, then rewarded themselves as though they'd had a successful year. Tribe is right that the outrage doesn't justify legislation punishing a specific class of people. But he fails to note that the entire bailout process was unconstitutional to begin with. There would be no bonus flap if the companies that had saddled themselves with bad debt had been allowed to reap the consequences of their actions. Indeed, we would all be better off if everyone--homeowner, bank, financial wizard--simply took their medicine for following the devil-may-care attitude of the last 5 to 10 years. But no, we're not willing to do that as a country, so we continue to aggravate the condition until the medicine becomes unavoidable and all that much more painful. Given the trillions of dollars being unconstitutionally manufactured and dispensed to favored parties, that day of reckoning is likely very close--one can only keep up the fascade for so long.