7 years ago
9
The Supreme Court Gets Ready to Legalize Corruption
Citizens United let rich people buy candidates; now they may be able to purchase office-holders, too. That’s the message from the Court’s argument last week in the appeal of Bob McDonnell, the former governor of Virginia.
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Why would they do otherwise? They have no reason to.
The reason would be constitutional because the role of SCOTUS is to make rulings in conjunction with the constitution of the republic that is the US. You could argue that their ruling is unconstitutional but you would have to know constitutional law as well as they do and argue from that POV. Or at least that is how it should work in principle.
"In the McDonnell case, his lawyers argued that what federal prosecutors called bribery was also really just speech by Jonnie R. Williams, the McDonnells’ benefactor. Noel Francisco, McDonnell’s lawyer, did a skillful job of giving a constitutional gloss to the seedy facts of his client’s case. Williams plied the McDonnell family with expensive vacations, a Rolex watch, fifteen thousand dollars for their daughter’s wedding reception, the use of a Ferrari, and a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in loans in an effort to get the governor to promote Williams’s nutritional-supplement enterprise"
I'm not a constitutional lawyer, but in my world of commerce, this is considered bribery. Look at a copy of The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. You'd be going to jail for these types of benefits.
I see the facts but evidently there is nothing illegal about them. Receiving gifts is legal and only improper when it can be proved they led to some other acts deemed illegal which in this case prosecutors couldn't prove. Case closed. I'm not saying that is morally correct but I make no assumption that SCOTUS Justices did not go over the case and simply made a ruling because "they had no reason not to". That kind of double negative implies that SCOTUS ruled in favor of defense because it is in Justices' personal interest only without any legal justification. I'm not saying it's not in their interest but clearly there must be legal justification to back the decision and any case seeking to overturn it must be argued from a legal perspective of constitutional basis. Moral outrage or cynical apathy does nothing to accomplish that and I simply do not understand constitutional law well enough to claim this decision is wrong constitutionally.
Yes, of course law is interpretive and different judges have differing views of the same thing. China has plenty of laws that get interpreted to fit the party line. Germany has it's own views of law, as does Saudi Arabia. Law is certainly man made and malleable. Not being schooled in the legal precision of making common sense into unrecognizable jumbles of words, I suppose we will just have to leave it to the fine people who know of such things and the simple minded, like me, will rejoice in their fairness and trust them.
I especially liked the stance of insider trading as it related to members of Congress.
I get that POV and I get the moral foundation on which it is coming from. But I must stress that moral outrage is precisely how we got to Justice college which rules according to populist lines of evangelical constituents of congress. It just so happens that their morality priorities sit outside of yours or mine but the way out of it is not to fight fire with fire and escalate ethical arms race but to bring the argument back to law and explain why it makes no sense constitutionally or why there needs to be an amendment to it. That is my position and I hope it doesn't offend anyone.
No your point is factually correct. I might add though, that law is in many cases the enforcement arm of the mores in a society, hence the many different laws in different societies. Moral outrage is a valid way to express displeasure with an unjust law. There is no way for a normal person to fix the conflicts, as the judges are not elected and are entrenched for life, in fact appointed by the very club (Congress) that is the source of the outrage. If we think that these judges are going to not find ways to not rock the establishment, then we are being naïve. Moral outrage is a good start.
http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/shavell/pdf/4_Amer_Law_Econ_Rev_227.pdf
I like that compromise. It is a good starting point (certainly far better than apathy). It must be followed through with something more substantial.
Like moral outrage. The legal profession has been compromised. Has it not?