Reflection on Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United by Zephyr Teachout

               Zephyr Teachout’s Corruption in America asserts that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the United States have been marked by the return of corruption that had been strongly legislated against by the founders. Teachout argues that modern definitions of corruption require far too high a threshold for proof of bribery and other crimes. I am obviously given to agree with her. In an age when Hilary Clinton gave speeches for hundreds of thousands of dollars and Donald Trump hosts his the G7 at his own hotel, the United States’ political scene is dominated by open corruption.

               One important source of corruption is the job of an American ambassador. From early times, ambassadors have accepted gifts from the heads of state where they lived. In the early USA, this was considered corrupt and banned, since while accepting a gift from a foreign head of state does not prove corruption, it certainly gets into dangerous territory. It is a crucial part of Teachout’s argument that the founders therefore understood corruption as something that can occur without any quid pro quo agreement that explicitly states what will be given and received. However, even today ambassador appointments are given politically so that only major donors can get the best ones. Teachout points out that while Justice Antonin Scalia has stated that there has always been a quid pro quo requirement to prove corruption or bribery, the phrase was not mentioned in relation to corruption until the 1970s, with the Buckley v Valeo case.

               One major problem of corruption is that under common law, bribery is something considered to taint the judiciary branch, but not the legislative. While common law developed protections against payment to a judge, it was long considered that Parliament would deal with its own people, something that transitioned over into the American system. The result is that few laws have existed to monitor the legislative branch, showing that legislators in America have not exactly been eager to regulate themselves.

               In the 19^th century, there were many cases that upheld the right of the government to restrict and even ban lobbying, as Georgia did in 1877. While the laws were never directly struck down, they were slowly chipped away into meaninglessness. First, state courts started to call lobbying contracts professional contracts instead of selling personal influence. Second, judges stopped ruling on the moral content of contracts and acted more as impersonal arbitrators, taking the default approach that lobbying contracts were legitimate. Third, the general view of the first amendment began to change to allow spending to count as speech.

               The 1976 Supreme Court case Buckley v Valeo was critical in changing the laws to allow for greater spending by non-persons in politics. It ruled that spending money on elections is a First Amendment right, that campaign contributions are presumptively valid, and that campaign expenditure limits are presumptively invalid. While it acknowledged that in the name of stopping corruption it may be important to infringe somewhat on these new “rights,” that has not happened much since. Things got really bad in 1999 when the court ruled that over $5,000 gifts given by the company Sun Diamond to the Secretary of Agriculture could not be proven to be bribery since they could not be conclusively connected to favor that the secretary gave to the company during his tenure. So even though the acts may happen on both ends, the law now required an explicit statement of the trade. Teachout writes that, “Sun Diamond makes it nearly impossible to prove a violation of the gratuities statute for any gift given before an official action.”

               With the Citizens United case, which gained a lot of infamy, the Court ruled that the First Amendment protects speech regardless of the identity of the speaker. It also found that “no sufficiently important countervailing governmental or constitutional goal was served by limiting corporate political advertising.” Teachout writes that nowadays, “corruption does not include undue influence and cannot flow from donors trying to influence policy through campaign contributions, unless these donors are utterly crass.” Basically, the court has accepted that all citizens will be very selfish and that the richest may have the privilege of purchasing policies that benefit them. This is hugely harmful to our democracy as it defeats the idea that all people should have an equal hand in the political process.

               Teachout defines corruption as any instance where public funds are used for private gain. She argues that SCOTUS, which used to have many more members who had been in elective offices, no longer appreciates the corrupting influence that campaign donations have on a politician. They accept the corruption as something inevitable when it is not. Teachout advocates public financing of all elections and trustbusting against monopolies as ways to cut corruption out of public life.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• The Tillman Act of 1907 banned corporations from contributing to political campaigns