Upon further review, the other decision handed down by the Supreme Court on Wednesday is the real shocker, and it stomps out any glimmer of hope that emerged from the Murthy decision discussed earlier. In Snyder v. United States, the carefully manufactured conservative majority maintained its unshakable fealty to corporate oligarchy by completing the work of legalizing bribery that began with the decision in Citizens United. The decision, written and delivered by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, is a clumsy work of intellectual gymnastics and an equally clumsy attempt by the majority to pretend that it lives in a land beyond all human frailty. That there are at least two justices in the majority who have dogs in this fight makes Snyder the final bit of evidence that this Supreme Court is irredeemably corrupt.
At issue was the case of an Indiana mayor named James Snyder, who’d accepted $13,000 from a trucking company after steering a million dollars’ worth of business the company’s way. From the AP:
Snyder was elected mayor of Portage in 2011 and was removed from office when he was first convicted in 2019. He has maintained his innocence, saying the money he received was payment for consulting work. His attorneys said that prosecutors hadn’t proved there was a “quid pro quo” exchange agreement before the contracts were awarded. The Justice Department countered that the law was clearly meant to cover gifts “corruptly” given to public officials as rewards for favored treatment.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s majority opinion contains ideas that can stand proudly in line with Justice Anthony Kennedy’s immortal “We now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption” from Citizens United. He drew a distinction between “bribes” and “gratuities” that must seem absurd to the ghosts of long-dead Chicago aldermen and Massachusetts state representatives.
“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] are typically payments made to an official after an official act as a token of appreciation.”
So if you are seeking to buy a public official, and if you want to stay out of trouble with the feds, it’s now best to wait until after the service is rendered to cut the check. If you’re a crooked pol, you have to betray your office before you get the sugar. And that is how the conservatives on the Supreme Court have now legalized bribery—on spec.
In dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did everything except provide a laugh track. For the purposes of public corruption, she explained, there is no difference between a bribe and a gratuity. She also took a direct shot at the members of the majority for Kavanaugh’s preposterous notion that the federal statute confuses those innocents in state houses and city halls who can’t determine the difference between a gift card to Red Lobster and a million bucks funneled to them by a company doing business with the city or the state. Poor dears, Jackson mused.
“Snyder’s absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one only today’s Court could love....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....But nothing about the facts of this case implicates any of that kind of conduct. And the text of §666 [the federal statute that this decision gutted] clearly covers the kind of corrupt (albeit perhaps non-quid pro quo) payment Snyder solicited after steering the city contracts to the dealership. Because reading §666 to prohibit gratuities—just as it always has—poses no genuine threat to common gift giving, but does honor Congress’s intent to punish rewards corruptly accepted by government officials in ways that are functionally indistinguishable from taking a bribe.
But the Court was not done making news. In a weird echo of the way the decision in the Dobbs case was leaked, somehow, a “document” was “accidentally” put up online that seemed to indicate that the Court is going to overturn the decisions from lower courts upholding Idaho’s hyper-restrictive anti-choice law. Bloomberg News grabbed the document before the Court took it down again. From The Washington Post:
The decision, which has not been announced by the court, would mean that hospitals could perform emergency abortions to stabilize patients without being subject to prosecution under Idaho’s abortion ban. It would be at least a temporary victory for the Biden administration, which has struggled to protect abortion access since the high court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago. According to a copy of the opinion posted by Bloomberg, the court’s ruling would reinstate a lower court decision that had allowed emergency abortion care while litigation continues. The court had paused that lower court ruling months ago, in an emergency action, before hearing arguments in the case in April.
Somebody get the hook. Seriously.
