Washington, DC - Today Congressman Dan Lungren (R-CA) addressed the bonuses made to AIG executives using taxpayer dollars.  Although the bonus payments are an outrageous and unjustifiable use of taxpayers' money, taxing the bonuses at confiscatory rates is unconstitutional. This sets a terrible precedent for the use of the tax code against other groups not favored by the government in the future.  There are other legal and constitutional ways to get the money back and prevent this from happening in the future.  The Congressman's remarks were delivered as follows:

"You know, facts are inconvenient things and the United States’ Constitution is an inconvenient truth at times, particularly when Congress wants to show it is upset about something it already did.  Here are the facts: in the stimulus package an amendment was adopted that the Majority put in stating that provisions in the TARP and stimulus bills that limited compensation payments would not apply to ‘any bonus payment required to be paid pursuant to a written employment contract executed on or before February 11, 2009.’  It was written specifically to protect the very bonuses that we're talking about here today.  And so now we're asking how do we undo what we did?  And the Majority has brought to us a bill that doesn't recognize the truth of the Constitution.  There is something called a bill of attainder.  You can't punish a group because you don't like them.  You can't have them treated more onerously than somebody else without a trial.

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"Now, that's an unfortunate truth that we have to deal with.  How can we deal with it?  Yesterday in the Judiciary Committee we had an alternative using bankruptcy principles, but that hasn’t been brought to the floor because it's arguably constitutional.  This is to get headlines to show we are outraged.  Let me tell you if we overturn the Constitution to show our outrage, no single American is safe.  Because in the future what we will do is say, we have a precedent that when we have an unpopular group, when we have a group that deserves some punishment, we won't go through the real laws.  What we'll do is we will pass a new tax law with confiscatory rates and say we have done it for the American people.  If you do that you are tearing up the Constitution.  I didn't come here to tear up the Constitution, to undo something that the Majority did just a few weeks ago.  We are better than that.  We need to protection the Constitution."