In an op-ed, Drexel law professor David S. Cohen first laments that hardly anyone seems to know what a bill of attainder is, and then—in contending that defunding Planned Parenthood would be an unconstitutional bill of attainder—shows that he doesn’t know what a bill of attainder is.
The Constitution prohibits both Congress and the states from passing any “Bill of Attainder.” (See Article I, section 9, clause 3 and Article I, section 10, clause 1.) Cohen starts off soundly, as he describes a bill of attainder as “a law that inflicts punishment upon a particular individual without a judicial trial,” but he quickly derails.
Cohen asserts, without citing any authority, that “removing Planned Parenthood’s federal funding … is a clear instance of punishment.” Oh, really?? So discontinuing a federal subsidy is punishment? That’s quite an extraordinary claim—one that would seem to call for some actual argument in support.
Cohen may be right that the Court would hold that corporations have protections against bills of attainder. But he seems not to understand that the proposition that a corporation is a legal person is not equivalent to the proposition that a corporation is an individual. In any event, what counts as punishment for a corporation isn’t easy to extrapolate from what counts as punishment for an individual.