On the March 18 broadcast of his radio show, Sean Hannity blamed congressional Democrats for the AIG bonuses, falsely asserting that they voted for the bonuses when they voted for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Hannity stated, “Now, if you're upset about this, you need to understand something, that there's a reason this happened. Every single Senate Democrat voted for those bonuses. Every -- almost every Democrat in the House voted for those, because they voted for the stimulus bill. And by the way, Republicans did not.” In fact, as Media Matters for America has documented, the economic recovery act did not require that AIG pay bonuses. Rather, the relevant provision in the act, which was based on an amendment by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), restricted the ability of companies receiving money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to award bonuses in the future.

In addition, Republicans did not vote against AIG bonuses by voting against the recovery bill, as Hannity suggested they did, since continuing the status quo would not have limited AIG's ability to pay the bonuses. Indeed, if Republicans had succeeded in defeating the recovery bill, the clause restricting the ability of companies to award bonuses in the future would not have become law. Further, 37 of the 38 Senate Republicans who voted against the final version of the recovery bill previously voted against the Senate version of the bill, which contained the original language of the Dodd amendment. That language stated that companies that received TARP money had to agree to “a prohibition on such TARP recipient paying or accruing any bonus, retention award, or incentive compensation during the period that the obligation is outstanding to at least the 25 most highly-compensated employees, or such higher number as the Secretary [of the Treasury] may determine is in the public interest with respect to any TARP recipient” -- without regard to whether those bonuses had been agreed to prior to the enactment of the legislation.

From the March 18 broadcast of ABC Radio Networks' The Sean Hannity Show:

HANNITY: And when you consider that AIG got $173 billion in your hard-earned tax dollars, over a thousand times greater than the $165 million in bonuses being reported ad nauseam, the point is more attention is being given to bonuses than bailouts in the first place. There never should've been a bailout of AIG. AIG is getting your money, and in turn billions of those dollars are going to foreign banks, $20 billion as we pointed out yesterday. It's going to foreign hedge funds, we find out. Goldman Sachs is getting $13 billion of this.

And I want to emphasize something here. And it -- Barack Obama with a straight face telling the American people that this is all for the benefit of you? How does this benefit you in any way? I don't see -- you know, Democrats for years have complained trickle-down economics doesn't work. So this is trickle-down socialism -- that's not going to work. The idea that we can give the elite few millions and millions of our dollars and that hopefully somehow they might go out and spend some of it? Is that the new trickle-down that they're advocating here?

Now, if you're upset about this, you need to understand something, that there's a reason this happened. Every single Senate Democrat voted for those bonuses. Every -- almost every Democrat in the House voted for those, because they voted for the stimulus bill. And by the way, Republicans did not, which provided -- by the way, this provided the legal protection to ensure that these bonuses would be paid.

You can also blame Barack Obama. He signed the bill, he insisted the bill be passed. He used all the fear-mongering he could muster to pass this bill in haste, and despite the fact that members of Congress hadn't even read the bill, despite the fact that Obama himself had never read the bill. Remember, he promised to go line by line and read these bills, and eliminate earmarks -- oh, that's right, the omnibus had 9,000 of them.

Now, if you think this is government you can count on, if this is the government you want running your health care, if this is the way you think we oughta run Congress, if you think this is a way to lead the nation, then you continue to support these guys. You know, the fact that these Democrats are now howling and feigning outrage about bonuses that they voted for, for a bill that they never read, that they protected as a matter of federal law is just an example of how socialism would work when implemented across the board in this country. And how putting the massive expansion of government is, you know, far and beyond what their top priority is. If you like Chicago politics, if you like European socialism, if you like incompetent government, if you like rewarding all the wrong behavior and punishing all the right behavior, then you've got your government. But this is not good government. This is not about fixing the economy. This is about grabbing as much power as possible and taking over as much of the private sector as they possibly can. And they're so obsessed with this that they're not even reading what laws they're passing. How sick is this? And then they attack as a matter of strategy anybody and everybody who dares to question what it is they're doing and how incompetent they are. All right. We'll get into all this. Got a lot more to get to here today. Mitt Romney's going to weigh in on it coming up at the top of our next hour.

Laura Deck is an intern at Media Matters for America.