Comment by hedora
19 hours ago
It’s a bill of Attainder, i.e., a legislative act that declares a specific individual or group guilty of a crime and imposes punishment without the benefit of a judicial trial.
19 hours ago
It’s a bill of Attainder, i.e., a legislative act that declares a specific individual or group guilty of a crime and imposes punishment without the benefit of a judicial trial.
From your own link:
> However, the Court has emphasized that legislation does not violate the Bill of Attainder Clause simply because it places legal burdens on a specific individual or group.2 Rather, as discussed in more detail below, a bill of attainder must also inflict punishment.
Divestment isn't a punishment for a crime. Nobody is accusing Tik Tok of having committed a crime. Congress simply doesn't want a foreign power hostile to the U.S. to control a business that's popular in the U.S.
Is it, though? Not a lawyer, obviously. But here I seem to agree with both Bytedance’s lawyers, and the full SCOTUS. Bytedance challenged on free speech terms. There are no dissents as to the Consitutionality of the law.
Prosaically, what individual or group is being declared guilty here? The law requires TikTok to have new ownership; it doesn’t seize it, or set a price for it, which might therefore harm shareholders. Calling this attainder seems like a pretty big stretch to me. And, it seems Bytedance legal counsel didn’t think this would fly as well.
Divestment could be a punishment in some circumstances. E.g. if Congress passed a law requiring Elon Musk to divest himself of X as punishment for purportedly violating the Securities Act.
The difference here is that Tik Tok is not being accused of a crime and is not being punished for some crime. It's applying a restriction on foreign ownership not to punish Tik Tok for some past act, but because Congress is worried about the risks arising from that ownership in the future.
No it isn't.