Frustration boiled over recently when Americans discovered that emaciated insurance company aig paid out $165 million in bonuses to its executives. The uproar from the American public was understandable. The bonus money, which came via a $180 billion federal government bailout, came from their wallets.

Many in Washington saw the outrage as an opportunity.

In a frenzied response, the House of Representatives quickly passed a bill imposing a 90 percent retroactive tax on the bonuses paid to aig executives. The bill—which allows the government to take 90 cents on the dollar of the bonuses already legally paid to aig executives, contractually promised to them before government intervention—was approved 328-93.

Superficially, the bill is appealing. It reprimands and discourages greed and goes a long way to diffusing public frustration over aig. It’s a legislative pacifier for an emotional and highly dissatisfied American public. But it’s much more than that. This pacifier is soaked in arsenic.

It is an attempt by radical politicians to exploit public dissatisfaction and assault the American Constitution.

The Constitution of the United States prohibits the aig bill. Among the laws prohibiting the bill is Section 1, Article 9, of the Constitution, which says that “no Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law [i.e., retroactive law] shall be passed.” This provision, explains Linda Monk in The Words We Live By, “prohibits Congress from passing a bill of attainder, which inflicts punishment on a person through an act of legislation, without a trial.”

Expounding on this article, Founding Father and foremost architect of the Constitution James Madison wrote: “Bills of attainder, ex-post-facto laws, and laws impairing the obligation of contracts, are contrary to the first principles of the social compact, and to every principle of sound legislation. The two former are expressly prohibited by the declarations prefixed to some of the state constitutions, and all of them are prohibited by the spirit and scope of these fundamental charters.”

That the aig bill is prohibited by the spirit of the Constitution is undeniable!

Richard Epstein, law professor at the University of Chicago, is among a chorus of lawyers and journalists arguing the Constitution prohibits the aig bill in letter also: “[A]ny sensible system of limited government should consider the proposed bills unconstitutional” (emphasis mine throughout). Epstein and his counterparts face heated opposition from those unwilling to take into account what Madison called the “spirit and scope” of the Constitution.

Despite the unconstitutionality of this bill, it was overwhelminglyembraced in the lower house of Congress. For every single congressman who chose to uphold the Constitution, three or four sacrificed it on the altar of public emotion.

The American Constitution is arguably the highest-quality legal charter designed by man. It has defined America ever since it was made supreme law on March 4, 1789. It is a portrait of the wisdom, insight and character of America’s forefathers and their understanding of human nature. It is the compass that has guided the United States to the heights of global power, political stability, judicial freedom and equity, economic prosperity and social cohesion and liberty.

The Constitution is so critical to America’s existence that its creators made it law that America’s leaders, such as who passed the aig bill, swear an oath that says they will “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

The overwhelming success of the aig tax bill in the House exposes how little America’s leaders value this document. It is proof, in fact, of the war being waged against the American Constitution.

Today, the greatest domestic enemies of the Constitution are radical liberal politicians who have sworn an oath to defend it!

Despite being overwhelmingly approved by the lower house, the aig bill—largely due to intense conservative opposition—has stalled in the Senate. Radical liberals are unfazed by the opposition. Many, like Joseph Bankman, law professor at Stanford University, believe that with a little technical creativity, they can circumvent Article 9. One way to make the aig bill constitutional, argues Bankman, is to make the legislation apply to employees of companiesbeyondaig.

This could never happen if these people understood and obeyed the spirit of the Constitution!

Bankman’s alarming idea is precisely what House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank and his liberal friends propose in a new bill about to go before the House. Chief political correspondent at the Examiner Byron York considered the alarming and far-reaching implications of this bill on Tuesday:

[I]n a little-noticed move, the House Financial Services Committee, led by Chairman Barney Frank, has approved a measure that would, in some key ways, go beyond the most draconian features of the original aig bill. The new legislation, the “Pay for Performance Act of 2009,” would impose government controls on the pay of all employees—not just top executives—of companies that have received a capital investment from the U.S. government. It would, like the tax measure, be retroactive, changing the terms of compensation agreements already in place. And it would give Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner extraordinary power to determine the pay of thousands of employees of American companies.

This new bill would essentially allow the American government to reach into the wallets of every American working for a company that has received bailout money from the government. The ramifications are truly horrifying—particularly if you consider that many more companies will likely receive government money in coming months. If passed, this bill will give the government unprecedented control over Americans working for these companies.

The Constitution is designed to protect American citizens from exactly this kind of imposition on individual rights. And that’s why radical liberals despise the Constitution: This charter is the public’s last line of defense against their extreme agenda!

The American president did not condemn the aig bill as it was being concocted and approved by the House of Representatives. He too was more interested in satiating public emotion than upholding the Constitution. Only when conservatives in the Senate and the media questioned the constitutionality of the bill did Barack Obama enter the fray. Consider the president’s reaction to claims that the bill was unconstitutional in a 60 Minutes broadcast on March 29:

Well, I think that, as a general proposition, you don’t want to be passing laws that are just targeting a handful of individuals. You want to pass laws that have some broad applicability. As a general proposition, I think you certainly don’t want to use the tax code to punish people.

Yet that is the one and only thing the aig bill is designed to do!

President Obama is a former constitutional law professor. He has intimate knowledge of the American Constitution. Yet he didn’t mention the Constitution once in his remarks about the aig bill. Any constitutional lawyer who deeply valued the Constitution would have replied, The bill should not be passed because it goes against the letter and spirit of the law.

Some argue that President Obama’s weak response shows more than merely a shallow understanding or weak commitment to the Constitution. They say it exposes his animosity toward it and his ambition to remodel it.

In the March issue of Newsmax, for example, Tim Collie anticipates the liberalization of American courts over the next four years, and investigates statements made by Barack Obama that he “wants judges who aren’t afraid to look outside the law [which is defined by the Constitution], to their own ‘values,’ and employ ‘empathy’ in dealing with cases.”

Time will reveal the true extent of the agenda being followed in Washington.

Watch closely and objectively. The extreme ambitions of this radical movement—chief of which is to systematically remodel the American Constitution—will show up in many of the policies and decisions made by the federal government. Just as they have been in the unconstitutional aig bill overwhelmingly approved by the House.

The success of this radical movement depends largely on two things: first, the ability of extreme liberal leaders to exploit the blinding emotion of the American people to further their liberal agenda; and second, Americans’ ignorance about the centrality of the Constitution in American history. People who fail to value the Constitution will not care when it’s dismantled and discarded.

America’s underpinnings—those qualities that contributed to this nation becoming the single greatest on Earth, including the rule of law, the Constitution, religion and morality—are being violently uprooted. This is not being done primarily by a foreign power or domestic militia, but by an extreme anti-religious, anti-law, anti-constitutional segment of the population that wields unprecedented influence within the American government.

To see these decisions as the violent assaults that they are, a person must be objective and educated. To be reminded about the supreme importance of the Constitution, and to learn exactly why this country has been so successful in the past, read No Freedom Without Law and Character in Crisis. In these booklets, Gerald Flurry explains precisely why he believes the Constitution is the most noble document ever written by a government of this world.

They explain why the American public ought to be enraged, not by the bonuses that aig executives received, but by the radical, unconstitutional response of many within the American government!