Via Vox: The Supreme Court rules that state officials can engage in a little corruption, as a treat
On a 6-3 party-line vote, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that state officials may accept “gratuities” from people who wish to reward them for their official actions, despite a federal anti-corruption statute that appears to ban such rewards.
[…]
Snyder turns on a distinction between “bribes” and “gratuities.” As Kavanaugh writes, “bribes are payments made or agreed to before an official act in order to influence the official with respect to that future official act.” Gratuities, by contrast, “are typically payments made to an official after an official act as a token of appreciation.” (Emphasis added.)
It strikes me as absurd to suggest that the timing of such a payment determines whether it is corrupt or not is rather problematic. As a faculty colleague asked me yesterday, “If I give them all As and they decide to give me $1000 as a gratuity, that’s cool, right?”
I suppose withe Trump’s proposal not to tax tips, its a win-win all around.
The basics of the case from the NYT:
The case before the court, Snyder v. United States, No. 23-108, concerned James Snyder, a former mayor of Portage, Ind., a city of about 38,000 people near Lake Michigan. In 2013, while Mr. Snyder was mayor, the city awarded two contracts for a garbage truck company, Great Lakes Peterbilt. Portage bought five garbage trucks for about $1.1 million.
In 2014, after the process was complete, the company cut Mr. Snyder a check for $13,000 for what he later said were consulting services.
The F.B.I. and federal prosecutors said the bidding process had been manipulated to ensure the company prevailed. Investigators said the money was a gratuity for the garbage truck contracts, but Mr. Snyder said it was payment for his consulting services as a contractor for Peterbilt.
A jury convicted Mr. Snyder of accepting an illegal gratuity, and a federal judge sentenced him to more than a year in prison. On appeal, Mr. Snyder argued that the federal statute criminalized only bribes, not after-the-fact gratuities. A federal appeals court affirmed his conviction, and Mr. Snyder petitioned the Supreme Court to review the case.
The Atlantic’s Ian MacGougal is a little more direct in his description:
The bid-rigging scheme was a classic of the genre. A small Rust Belt city needed new garbage trucks. Its mayor and two of his donors needed money. The mayor, a struggling mortgage lender, owed years’ worth of back taxes; the donors were two brothers desperate to save the truck dealership they’d spent the past few years running into the ground. So the mayor fixed things to steer the garbage-truck contracts to the brothers, a million-dollar cushion under their failing dealership. Thankful for this good turn, they cut the mayor a check for $13,000 ostensibly for some consulting work, the substance of which was never clear.
[…]
As far as federal law is concerned, state and local officials are now generally free to accept gifts small and large—$13,000 checks, lavish vacations, cash-stuffed valises—from the beneficiaries of their actions in office. (State and local laws still apply to them, but only a small fraction of corruption cases are brought by state prosecutors.)
MacDougal goes on to detail other recent Court decisions that have weakened anti-corruption laws (and rightly notes all of this comes at a time wherein public trust in our institutions is fading).
The notion that the timing is what matters, rather than other aspects of the case (and what strikes me as the clear intent of the law) is absurd. Legitimate consulting activities before or after a given event can be demonstrated. But just calling something “consulting” does not make it so.
It is difficult for me to read the text of the law and come to the conclusion that the timing of the payments is the key issue.
To put the whole thing in meme form, because I guess this is how I can maintain my sanity:
Back to Vox, the least surprising part of all of this:
It’s also notable that neither Justice Clarence Thomas nor Justice Samuel Alito, both of whom have accepted expensive gifts from politically active Republican billionaires, recused themselves from the case. Thomas and Alito both joined Kavanaugh’s opinion reading the anti-corruption statute narrowly.
Be sure to tip your Justices if they did a good job!
