July 6, 2024
Did the Supreme Court just legalize political bribery?
It’s a great question. I’m going to answer it in this video.
Ok – last week, the Supreme Court ruled on a case called Snyder vs the United States. Snyder is James Snyder the former republican mayor of Portage Indiana. In 2014 Snyder took $13,000 from a local Peterbilt truck dealership one year after the same dealership won two city contracts worth more than a million dollars. Snyder was charged and convicted of violating a federal law that makes it illegal for state and local officials to “corruptly solicit or accept anything of value from any person, intending to be influenced or rewarded” for an official act. Snyder was sentence to a year and nine months in prison. Well – Snyder appealed saying the actual federal statute only criminalizes bribes not gratuities. And Snyder said that $13,000 was not a reward for the city contract – he argued it was payment because he was working as a consultant for Peterbilt. His case made it all the way up to the Supreme Court. And in a six to three ruling, all the conservatives sided with Snyder.
In the majority opinion written by Justice Kavanaugh he points out that federal and state laws spell out two kinds of payments to public officials. Bribes and gratuities. Under the law, bribes are payments made or agreed to *before* an official act in order to influence a public official and gratuities are payments made to a public official after an official act as a reward or token of appreciation. Kavanaugh writes, “while American law generally treats bribes as inherently corrupt and unlawful, the law’s treatment of gratuities is more nuanced.” The Supreme Court ruled the specific federal law sender was convicted of violating — prohibits bribes – but “it does not make it a crime for those officials to accept gratuities for their past acts.”
How is that legal? Well the court just ruled the way the federal law is written suggests it was meant to only to cover federal and state bribery ahead of an official act. That’s punishable up to 15 years in prison. No one is questioning that. The question is about gratuities. There’s a separate federal law that forbids officials from also accepting illegal gratuities…if convicted they could face up to two years in prison. But in last week’s opinion the supreme court’s conservative majority ruled in that law, congress didn’t specifically say the gratuities statue applies to local and state officials only to federal ones.
Kavanaugh writes all states have different customs when it comes to gifts. So until congress passes a gratuities law that also applies to state officials, the supreme court needs to stay out of it. He writes, “the differing approaches by the state and local governments reflect policy judgments about when gifts expressing appreciation to public officials for their past acts cross the line from the innocuous to the problematic. Those carefully calibrated policy decisions would be gutted if the court were to accept the government’s interpretation of §666.”
In her dissent, Justice Jackson said the majority was choosing to ignore the plain text of the law and instead carving out an exception for state officials that does not exists. Not only did she take a dig at Snyder but she also took a dig at her conservative colleagues. She wrote “Snyder’s absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one only today’s court could love.”
Read the ruling from the Supreme Court here.
