A recent torrent of fury was unleashed among House members when it was discovered that bank executives in the face of a taxpayer bailout had received $165 million in bonuses on contracts signed prior to the deposit of taxpayer largesse into the banks' hands.

When angry House members passed by an overwhelming margin a measure seeking to counteract this result by taxing bonus recipients 90 percent, the issue of constitutionality was raised from some Republican circles and echoed by others within the media and legal communities.

Such an act in the view of those individuals was perceived as a punitive response by government and hence constituted a bill of attainder, a move thereby deemed to be unconstitutional.

Now, according to a New York Times March 25 article by Louise Story, "As major markets and economies careened downward last year, 25 top managers reaped a total of $11.6 billion in pay by trading above the pain in the markets, according to an annual ranking of top hedge fund earners by Institutional Investor's Alpha magazine, which comes out Wednesday."