Supreme Court Legalizes Influence Peddling: McDonnell v. United States

June 30, 2016
Supreme Court Legalizes Influence Peddling: McDonnell v. United States

by Rob Hager

The Supreme Court has mostly completed its decimation of any anti-corruption laws that might present more than the slightest inconvenience for the plutocracy’s political investments. Therefore the Court has now picked up its judicial supremacy ax to perform the same demolition on the other side of the corruption equation. In a decision announced on June 27, timed to be one of the three final opinions of its 2015-16 term, the Court turned its attention to protecting the influence peddlers who benefit from the now freely flowing plutocratic investments from prosecution for their delivery of the peddled policies.

The Supreme Court had previously ruled in line of cases culminating in McCutcheon v. FEC (2014) that plutocrats have a First Amendment right to buy, under the guise of campaign financing, undue influence which creates conflicts of interest for the peddlers of that influence. Chief Justice Roberts wrote in McCutcheon that “ingratiation and access” bought in this manner “are not corruption…. They embody a central feature of democracy.” Under the Supreme Court’s bizarre interpretation that “freedom of speech” is the equivalent of freedom to make political pay-offs, the Supreme Court thus denies government the power to restrict the flow of special interest money into politician’s pockets through the various channels for campaign financing.

The Supreme Court justifies its project of eliminating legal restraints on the sources of campaign finance corruption that flows to politicians on the grounds that the corrupting effects can be prevented by prosecuting the targeted recipients of the money for committing bribery, which the Court calls quid pro quo corruption. The Latin term lends legalistic gravitas to the Court’s otherwise unsupported distinction between the individual and transactional character of legal bribery and the systemic character of most contemporary corruption that the Supreme Court has created and perpetuated by legalizing an increasing flow of money into politics through expanding channels since 1976. The Court holds that only the relatively narrow category of quid pro quo transactions, bribery, can be addressed by government.

The Court’s fatuous argument that there is a constitutional reason to enforce laws against bribery but not against systemic corruption ignores the vast difference between the remedies appropriate to address individual acts of corruption and those remedies required to treat systemic corruption. Bribery involves a direct two-way knowing transaction, easily concealed and therefore very difficult to prosecute. The more amorphous kind of systemic influence peddling that involves unspoken networks of exchange requires an entirely different set of remedies which the Court has mostly outlawed. The classic form of systemic corruption routes the flow of money through various intermediary organizations such as SuperPACs while the demand for policy is routed separately through lobbyists, leaving the essential indicia of a quid pro quo relationship only implicit, and therefore incapable of supporting a bribery charge.