Comments on: Does Congress Have The Authority To Take Back The AIG Bonuses

By: Hal

Hal — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:22:08 +0000

This is maddening. People are missing the big picture here. Our government made it ok for these people that we bailed out to get the bonuses then they turned around and singled out those people for a tax! I guess there’s an argument that it’s unconstitutional. But regardless it looks down right evil to me.

They just announced adding another trillion plus dollars to our debt enslaving more Americans to future taxes. Our debt is about to, if it hasn’t already, out pace our GDP for pity sake.

Did you see what that did to things like gold! I was watching with the free widget ExactPrice ( http://www.learcapital.com/exactprice ) when the announcement came out and it sky rocketed. But what a lot of people haven’t mentioned is that it just before that announcement the gold dropped big time. Smelled like manipulation to me. And I saw in the news that a number of banks are now buying up gold. I wonder how many bought gold during that drastic fall only to have it sky rocket on the FED announcement.

Something that’s been itching at the back of my head was the FDR deal where they made it illegal for citizens to own gold and so confiscated all the gold they could get their hands on. With this 90% unconstitutional tax they just levied against the AIG employees I am not so sure that we won’t see a redo of FDR where they’ll come and take our real wealth in the form of land and precious metals to secure real wealth once this money bubble bursts.

By: Simon Dodd

Simon Dodd — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:30:53 +0000

Doug, I don’t disagree; I’m just noting the qualification that it’s not uncontroverted that equal protection applies only to the states. Bolling was certainly wrong then, and is now probably – in Justice Frankfurter’s words – a derelict on the waters of law, one of those cases that hasn’t been formally overruled but is no longer considered good law. Nevertheless, we might often think that the Supreme Court decided a case wrongly, but we can’t just ignore that it did decide it. If an on-point case exists, even if it’s of dubious precedential value, that warrants mention in a post the purpose of which is to clarify the governing law.

By: Doug Mataconis

Doug Mataconis — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:22:34 +0000

Simon,

Even if Bolling is still good law, the other side of the coin is that the AIG Execs would most likely not be able to put forward a credible Equal Protection claim under current EP case law.

By: Simon Dodd

Simon Dodd — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:16:18 +0000

Sorry, extent=extend in my comment above.

By: Simon Dodd

Simon Dodd — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:14:12 +0000

Re the equal protection clause, you’re quite right that the clause’s text plainly restricts only the states, and not the federal government. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court decided otherwise – in an opinion thinly-reasoned even by the standards of the Warren Court – in Bolling v. Sharpe. That case performed a bizarre piece of jurisprudential jujitsu in which equal protection was reverse-incorporated into the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause in order to strike down segregation in the District of Columbia. A noble goal, to be sure, but a preposterous sham of legal reasoning nevertheless.

Of course, that the court once made a well-intentioned mistake is not necessarily reason to continue to extent the reasoning of that case to new areas such as this, and I think that the court should resist the temptation.