This is pure evil. The Los Angeles Times reports:
A state Senate panel approved legislation Wednesday aimed at preventing embattled Clippers owner Donald Sterling from writing off fines levied by the NBA as a business expense on his state income tax returns...Fortunately, it doesn't appear the bill will become law:
Assemblyman Reginald Jones-Sawyer (D-Los Angeles) said he and Assemblyman Raul Bocanegra introduced the bill because they did not think state tax laws should reward owners of sports franchises for “behaving badly.”
[Chairwoman Lois ] Wolk voted for the bill even though she said she is concerned about singling out one private entity for a change in the tax law that has implications for free-speech rights...Republican Sens. Steven Knight of Palmdale and Mimi Walters of Irvine did not support the measure for similar reasons.
Walters said Sterling’s comments were “disgusting” but that she was voting against the bill because “when government starts to insert itself in the right to free speech, then we start to have a problem.”
Knight abstained from voting, asking, “If we do this, where do we stop? Do we go to [include] the players. Do we go to the agents?”
AB 877 next goes to the Senate Appropriations Committee.
“It's really got an uphill battle,” Wolk said, adding that if the measure makes it to the desk of Gov. Jerry Brown, “I think it's going to be a hard one to get a signature on.”-RW
If racial bigotry were banned by the NBA and if the rule were enforced, the NBA would be nearly all white again.
ReplyDeleteIsn't this kind of singling out legislation specifically prohibited by the constitution?
ReplyDeleteThis bill is a slam dunk for violation of the US Constitution, which shows the ignorance of this legislator. It is either a Bill of Attainder or in general an Ex Post Facto bill
ReplyDeleteOf course the state judicial system weasels out of enforcing this any way it can.
The Constitution prohibits both the federal government (Article I, Section 9, Clause 3) and the states (in Article I, Section 10, Clause 1) from passing either bills of attainder or ex post facto laws.
Heritage.org Guide to constitution
Bill of Attainder is an act of a legislature declaring a person or group of persons guilty of some crime and punishing them without privilege of a judicial trial.
wikipedia
An ex post facto law (Latin for "from after the action" or "after the facts") is a law that retroactively changes the legal consequences (or status) of actions that were committed, or relationships that existed, before the enactment of the law. In criminal law, it may criminalize actions that were legal when committed;
wikipedia
That certainly seems like, in effect, a Bill of Attainder.
ReplyDelete