Obama Bank Tax: Wall St. Mulls Court Challenge

Jan. 18. 2010 — -- Just days after President Obama unveiled a new tax on the country's biggest banks, Wall Street is already preparing for a possible legal challenge to the administration's proposal.

The Securities Industry & Financial Markets Association, Wall Street's main lobbying group, has hired top Supreme Court litigator Carter G. Phillips of Sidley Austin to look into possibly mounting a legal battle against the President's proposed bank tax. They might fight it on the grounds that it would be unconstitutional because it singles out big banks, ABC News has confirmed with sources familiar with the matter.

Last week – when the President unveiled his proposal – executives at the lobbying group sent an e-mail to the legal departments of Wall Street's biggest firms warning that the bank tax could be unconstitutional, the sources said.

"Using the tax code as a punitive measure, besides being bad policy, creates Constitutional problems," Scott Talbott, chief lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable in Washington, told ABC News Monday.

Talbott called the President's proposal a "bill of attainder," an act that declares a group guilty and punishes them without first granting them a trial.

The President's bank tax – known as the "Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee" – will be included in the President's 2011 budget proposal. It would tax about 50 of Wall Street's biggest firms with assets of $50 billion or more. The administration hopes it would bring about $90 billion into government coffers over the next decade.

"We want our money back and we're going to get it," the President said last Thursday at the White House.

The recouped money would then go towards reducing around $120 billion in expected taxpayer losses from the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

"We oppose this very targeted and punitive tax, especially when it affects firms that have either already repaid, with interest, their TARP funds or never took TARP funds in the first place," said Andrew DeSouza, spokesman for the Securities Industry & Financial Markets Association.

A Treasury spokesman adamantly rejected the idea that the bank tax could be ruled unconstitutional.

"Any assertion that this fee is unconstitutional is totally without merit," Treasury spokesman Andrew Williams told ABC News Monday.