Supreme Court Republicans: bribery is legal under federal law as long as you defer payment

Today,our nation’s caller of balls and strikes continued its ongoing attempts to make political corruption nearly impossible to prosecute. In this case, a mayor steered more than a million of city contracts to a truck dealership, which in turn cut him a $13,000 check. A jury, for obvious reasons, convicted him for violating a federal statute prohibiting public officials from accepting gifts “intending to be influenced or rewarded.” The Court’s Republicans, however, threw out the conviction because Snyder accepted the check after delivering the contracts making an explicit agreement ex ante. This, according to the Court’s Republicans, is a “gratuity” not a “bribe” and hence falls outside the federal law. The Court’s opinion, fittingly enough, was assigned to Brett “I own a junior high civics textbook and my clerks can use it to pad out my opinions” Kavanaugh, who also invented a states’ rights argument that did not have any actual foundation in limits on federal power.

It must be said that the Court’s liberals have often been collaborators in the Court’s anti-anti-corruption crusade, but in this case Jackson (joined by Sotomayor and Kagan) dissented:

Snyder’s absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one  only today’s Court could love. Ignoring the plain text of §666—which, again, expressly targets officials who “corruptly” solicit, accept, or agree to accept payments “intending to be influenced or rewarded”—the Court concludes that the statute does not criminalize gratuities at all. This is so, apparently, because “[s]tate and local governments often regulate the gifts that state and local officials may accept,” ante, at 1, which, according to the majority, means that §666 cannot.

The Court’s reasoning elevates nonexistent federalism concerns over the plain text of this statute and is a quintessential example of the tail wagging the dog. Section 666’s regulation of state, local, and tribal governments reflects Congress’s express choice to reach those and other entities receiving federal funds. And Congress not only had good reasons for doing so, it also had the authority to take such legislative action, as this Court has already recognized. We have long held that when Congress has appropriated federal money, it “does not have to sit by and accept the risk of operations thwarted by local and state improbity.” 

 Both the majority and Snyder suggest that interpreting §666 to cover gratuities is problematic because it gives “federal prosecutors unwarranted power to allege crimes that should be handled at the State level.” But woulds, coulds, and shoulds of this nature must be addressed across the street with Congress, not in the pages of the U. S. Reports. We have previously and wisely declined “to express [a] view as to [§666’s] soundness as a policy matter.”  But, today, the Court can stay silent no longer. Its decision overrides the intent of Congress—and the policy preferences of the constituents that body represents—as unequivocally expressed by the plain text of the statute. Respectfully, I dissent.

“I would, personally, prefer corruption to be regulated at the state and local governments, so I will attribute this policy preference to Congress itself despite the explicit text of the statute it enacted” reminds me of Peter Gammons’s classic article about umpires who thought it was outrageous that the strike zone they called should actually resemble the one on the MLB rulebook.