The US supreme court just basically legalized bribery | Moira Donegan | The Guardian 6/27/24, 8:22 PM

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Opinion
US politics
The US supreme court just basically
legalized bribery
Moira Donegan

Thu 27 Jun 2024 06.00 EDT By sheer coincidence, this ruling concerns the sort of generous
‘gifts’ and ‘gratuities’ that justices have been known to accept

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‘If you’re rich enough, says the supreme court, you can now pay off state and local officials for
government acts that fit your policy preferences or advance your interests.’ Photograph: Olivier
Douliery/AFP/Getty Images

D
id you know you could give your local government officials tips
when they do things you like? Brett Kavanaugh thinks you can. In
fact, if you’re rich enough, says the US supreme court, you can
now pay off state and local officials for government acts that fit
your policy preferences or advance your interests. You can give them lavish
gifts, send them on vacations, or simply cut them checks. You can do all of
this so long as the cash, gifts or other “gratuities” are provided after the
service, and not before it – and so long as a plausible deniability of the Most viewed
meaning and intent of these “gratuities” is maintained.
My partner wants m
ejaculate 5 and I’m n

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The US supreme court just basically legalized bribery | Moira Donegan | The Guardian 6/27/24, 8:22 PM

ejaculate 5 and I’m n

That was the ruling authored by Kavanaugh in Snyder v United States, a 6-3 it’s possible
opinion issued on Wednesday, in which the supreme court dealt the latest
blow to federal anti-corruption law. In the case, which was divided along Sinkhole appears in
ideological lines, the court held that “gratuities” – that is, post-facto gifts and field above Illinois m
payments – are not technically “bribes”, and therefore not illegal. Bribes are ‘Out of a movie’
only issued before the desired official act, you see, and their meaning is
explicit; a more vague, less vulgarly transactional culture of “gratitude” for Live Panama v US
official acts, expressed in gifts and payments of great value, is supposed to be América 2024 5 live
something very different. The court has thereby continued its long effort to
legalize official corruption, using the flimsiest of pretexts to rob federal anti-
corruption statutes of all meaning. ‘We cannot deny hi
again’: Brazil floods
The case concerns James Snyder, who in 2013 was serving as the mayor of
how German migra
small-town Portage, Indiana. Late that year, the city of Portage awarded a silenced Black and
contract to Great Lakes Peterbilt, a trucking company, and bought five tow Indigenous stories
trucks from them; a few weeks later, Snyder asked for and accepted a check
for $13,000 from the company. Snyder was found guilty of corruption and ‘We are really sorry
sentenced to 21 months in federal prison. He argued that the kickback was behind Uncle Frog’s
Mushroom Gummi
not illegal because it came after he awarded a contract to the company that apologises after peo
ultimately paid him off, not before. hospitalised across
Australia
Absurdly the US supreme court agreed, classifying such payments as mere
tokens of appreciation and claiming they are not illegal when they are not
the product of an explicit agreement meant to influence official acts in
exchange for money.

In so doing, the court has narrowed the scope of anti-corruption law for state
and local officials to apply to only those exchanges of money, goods and
official favor in which an explicit quid pro quo arrangement can be proved.
As in Cargill – the court’s recent decision legalizing bump stocks, wherein the
court declared that the gun accessories do not render semiautomatic rifles
into machine guns based on a lengthy technical explanation of the meaning
of a “trigger function” – the court in Snyder has made an extended,
belabored foray into a definitional distinction between “bribes” and
“gratuities”.

But the glaring reality remains that this is largely a distinction without a
difference. As Ketanji Brown Jackson noted in her dissent, this is an
interpretation which no reasonable reading of the statute can support. In a
dissent whose tone seemed exasperated, almost sarcastic, she called the
majority opinion “absurd and atextual”, saying it “elevates nonexistent
federalism concerns over the plain texts of this statute and is a quintessential
case of the tail wagging the dog”. The “bribery” versus “gratuity”
distinction, she said, allows officials to accept rewards for official acts in
ways that are “functionally indistinguishable from taking a bribe”.

The court’s narrow vision of corruption – one in which only explicit,

whispered deals in shadowy, smoke-filled back rooms count as “corruption”,
and all other forms of influence and exchange are something other than the
genuine article – also fundamentally misunderstands how influence-
peddling works. In his controlling opinion, Kavanaugh emphasizes that in
order to be an illegal bribe, a gift or payment must be accompanied by “a
corrupt state of mind” on behalf of the official or benefactor. But corruption,
influence-peddling, and unfair and undue methods of persuasion are more
subtle and complicated than this in practice.

For an example, we need look no further than the conservative justices of the
supreme court itself, who have become notorious, in recent years, for
accepting lavish gifts and chummy intimacy from rightwing billionaires.
According to investigative reporting by ProPublica, Clarence Thomas has
accepted vacations, real estate purchases, tuition for his young relatives, and
seemingly innumerable private jet trips from the billionaire Harlan Crow, as

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The US supreme court just basically legalized bribery | Moira Donegan | The Guardian 6/27/24, 8:22 PM

well as financing for an RV from another wealthy patron, Anthony Welters.

Thomas has argued that these gifts and favors are merely the “personal
hospitality” of “close personal friends”.

ProPublica also reports that Samuel Alito, who flies insurrectionist flags
outside his Virginia mansion and New Jersey beach house, has accepted the
hospitality of the Republican mega-donor Paul Singer; the billionaire took
Alito along on his private jet to a fishing resort in Alaska, where the justice
stayed, played and reportedly drank $1,000 wine on the billionaire’s dime.
(Alito has disputed aspects of ProPublica’s characterization.)

There is no reporting to indicate that the justices received this expansive and
expensive generosity in direct compensation for their extremely
conservative jurisprudence, even though the judges’ legal writings have
furthered the billionaire’s material interests and social preferences. It seems
reasonable, to me, to infer that the gifts, as frequent and valuable as they are,
are not the product of explicit agreements to exchange things of value for
specific official acts.

If anything, I think that these relationships do not seem corrupt to the men
who take part in them; that they see their relationships with billionaires, and
their receipt of these billionaires’ largesse, as innocent and proper
expressions of affection between friends and ideological fellow travelers.
Clarence Thomas may be able to feel something, in the dark depths of his
soul, that we might recognize as akin to love, and he may indeed feel that
love for Harlan Crow.

But this “love”, or whatever it is, does not mean that what is happening
between these men is not corruption, and it does not mean that the law has
nothing to say about it. Connections like these are cultivated with both the
intention and the effect of rewarding and encouraging conservative
outcomes; an explicit quid pro quo comes to seem vulgar and unnecessary in
their midst, in which social reinforcement and personal loyalty do the work
that a more explicit bribe would otherwise accomplish.

Adding money – or, in the court’s parlance, “gratuities” – to these

arrangements only makes this more obvious. It is not a coincidence that the
court has chosen to legalize for state and local officials exactly the sort of
corruption that they partake of so conspicuously themselves.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

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The US supreme court just basically legalized bribery | Moira Donegan | The Guardian 6/27/24, 8:22 PM

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