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Hypocrite Jerry Nadler: ACORN defunding unconstitutional
By Rizzuto

Fri Sep 18, 2009 - Today, Jerrold Nadler released a press release in which he charges that the amendment which defunds ACORN is unconstitutional.

Today, Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Chair of the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, denounced a Republican Amendment adopted by the House of Representatives to deny all federal funds to ACORN as blatantly unconstitutional and a threat to unpopular organizations everywhere. The Republican initiative, entitled the Defund ACORN Act, singles out a specific organization by name for exclusion from participating in any federal program, in direct violation of the Constitution’s prohibition against Bills of Attainder.

“Today’s Republican Amendment is in blatant violation of the Constitution’s prohibition against Bills of Attainder,” said Nadler. “Congress must not be in the business of punishing individual organizations or people without trial, and that’s what this Amendment does. Whatever one may think of an organization, the Constitution’s clear ban on Bills of Attainder is there for the protection of all of our liberties.”

A Bill of Attainder is an act of the legislature which punishes an individual or group of individuals without trial. American citizens are indeed constitutionally protected from Bills of Attainder, which is meant to restrict the legislative branch from carrying out the duties of the judiciary.

Nadler now decides to expand the definition of a Bill of Attainder by including the refusal of government subsidies and funding to organizations whose dealings are at best shady, and at worst, systematically criminal. This would assume that a group like ACORN somehow has a right to this funding in the first place as Bills of Attainder generally refer to the violations of life, confiscation of property, or as James Madison wrote in Federalist 44, the “impairing [of] the obligations of contracts.”

Legally speaking, Nadler is full of it.

I might also remind you that this is the same Jerrold Nadler who voted for HR 1586, which imposed up to 90% taxes on the bonuses of AIG employees who were contractually entitled to them. The government literally confiscated the private property of citizens as punishment for AIG’s collapse and subsequent government bailout, and it did so without a trial. So not only is Jerry simply wrong about his definition of a Bill of Attainder, he’s also a hypocrite who has, in the recent past, thrown his considerable weight behind a bill which is essentially a Bill of Attainder itself.