Is bribery now totally legal?

Robert Reich
6.30.2016

The Supreme Court has unanimously thrown out former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s 11-count corruption conviction because the state prosecutor defined “bribery of a public official” too broadly.

This is nuts. There’s no factual dispute that McDonnell accepted gifts and loans worth more than $175,000, including a Rolex watch, designer clothes, lavish vacations, and use of a Ferrari sports car, from a businessman who had sought the governor’s help in promoting a dietary supplement. But the Court held that simply meeting with someone in exchange for a personal gift or campaign contribution is not an “official act” and therefore doesn’t constitute federal bribery. Writing for the Court, Chief Justice John Roberts reasoned that “the basic compact underlying representative government assumes that public officials will hear from their constituents and act appropriately on their concerns,” and that if corruption is defined too broadly “officials might wonder whether they could respond to even the most commonplace requests for assistance, and citizens with legitimate concerns might shrink from participating in democratic discourse."

Roberts may be correct in the abstract but the facts of this case show clear-cut bribery. The Court’s decision gives the wealthy and powerful even more license to corrupt our system, and it underscores the urgent need for stricter state and federal campaign-finance laws.

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