Whatever its flaws, I like it. Maybe (probably) I don’t know nearly as much about the details as I should. Maybe I am responding viscerally. I don’t care. These reprehensible asses have been robbing us as customers to line their own pockets, and now they’re robbing us as taxpayers to line their own pockets. If these bonuses were reasonable and as tied purely to performance as they so falsely claim, that would be one thing. But they are not.

Republicans in Congress, predictably, are putting up resistance. Many are caving in and voting with Democrats just like Democrats did with Republicans on the Iraq War. The similarity is due to both being immediate third-rail policies, the difference is that (of course depending on your opinion) one was for the wrong reasons and the other is for the right reasons.

The Republicans’ reasons to protest:

Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right. … since the bonuses have been distributed, the solution is not to compound the problem with more inappropriate actions by the federal government.

This only makes sense if you agree that taxing obscenely wrong bonuses is a “wrong.” Many beg to differ.

Retroactive Tax Increase. The tax increase in the bill would be applied to bonuses paid after December 31, 2008. Many conservatives believe that retroactive tax increases are unfair and unconstitutional.

This only applies if you see it applied to specific days of the year. This bill is aimed at the current tax year, so I do not think it is retroactive.

Confiscatory Tax Rate. The legislation creates a tax rate of 90%.

Of course it’s confiscatory. That’s the point. I for one have no problems with this. These scumwads are running off with money earned by working Americans that was intended to save the business and benefit the nation, not enrich the same dishonest bastards that lost the firms’ money in the first place. If Republicans think that it’s wrong to confiscate that money, then I think they go too far on principle where it frankly should never apply.

Bill of Attainder. The bill, while not mentioning AIG by name, is clearly meant to punish AIG executives who received high bonuses–a specific group of individuals in response to public outrage over the bonuses.

The idea being that only courts should be able to apply such specific punishments. They believe that we are punishing a very specific group of people, even though it is a group, and no specific people or even corporations are named. And I think that’s where this argument fails; you can’t name all the specific people who will be affected yet, and more people could fall under this classification based upon their actions, not who they are. After all, one could say that the Estate Tax is a bill of attainder if one limited the definition to a “restricted group or class of people.” That this bill is aimed at anyone working for a firm receiving large amounts of taxpayer bailout money emphasizes the fact that there is a public interest. It is aimed at a wrong, not specific people. Furthermore, it does not really “punish” anyone; if the Congress passed a law that said bank robbers had to pay back 90% of the money they stole but don’t have to go to jail, I rather doubt that Republicans would be crying foul over an “unfair punishment.” Not to mention that Republicans are probably crying foul only because it is white-collar executives running off with public money–if it were bank robbers doing the exact same thing, they’d want to hang the bastards. But these guys are too close to their core constituency.