by In thirteen years of hostile decisions, the Roberts Supreme Court has done all it can to legalize corruption. With the Bridgegate case, it gets a chance to wreak even more havoc and possibly end the use of the term “corruption” as a useful legal concept.... That the purpose, wasn't it? If this is not judicial activism, what is? This approach to corruption sets the Roberts Supreme Court apart from other Supreme Courts. For over a century, previous Supreme Courts upheld campaign finance laws and other regulations which try to keep graft and political intimidation at bay precisely because as the Supreme Court recognized in Ex parte Yarbrough in 1884, “[i]n a republican government like ours, where political power is reposed in representatives of the entire body of the people, chosen at short
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Mike Norman considers the following as important: corruption, legalization, Roberts court, SCOTUS, US justice system, US Supreme Court
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In thirteen years of hostile decisions, the Roberts Supreme Court has done all it can to legalize corruption. With the Bridgegate case, it gets a chance to wreak even more havoc and possibly end the use of the term “corruption” as a useful legal concept....That the purpose, wasn't it? If this is not judicial activism, what is?
This approach to corruption sets the Roberts Supreme Court apart from other Supreme Courts. For over a century, previous Supreme Courts upheld campaign finance laws and other regulations which try to keep graft and political intimidation at bay precisely because as the Supreme Court recognized in Ex parte Yarbrough in 1884, “[i]n a republican government like ours, where political power is reposed in representatives of the entire body of the people, chosen at short intervals by popular elections, the temptations to control these elections by violence and by corruption is a constant source of danger…. no lover of his country can shut his eyes to the fear of future danger from both sources."...
But wait, there’s more. The Roberts Supreme Court has also rebranded corruption by changing what counts as white-collar crimes. In Skilling v. US (a case brought by disgraced ex-CEO of Enron Jeff Skilling challenging his 24-year prison sentence for defrauding the company’s shareholders), the Supreme Court agreed with Skilling that he should not have been charged with honest services fraud because his crimes did not involve a bribe or a kickback. This Supreme Court decision led to Skilling getting 10 years shaved off of his original sentence. He was released from jail in 2018 and left his halfway house in 2019. He is now a free man....
As I discuss in my article and my book, the Supreme Court’s role in gutting corruption has been keenly watched by shady politicians and their lawyers. If you pull the legal briefs in criminal cases charging politicians of crimes like bribery and fraud, what you will find is citations to white-collar crime cases like Skilling and McDonnell, as well as citations to campaign finance cases like Citizens United and McCutcheon, as reasons why whatever awful thing the politician did is not actually a crime.Is the intent to install plutonomy, the oligarchy of wealth, under the veneer of representative democracy?Corruption isn’t a partisan matter. Both Democratic and Republican politicians have been accused of abusing their offices for private gain. And using the Roberts Supreme Court cases to their advantage is equally bipartisan....
Interestingly, in Western liberal "democracies", the oligarchy of wealth called plutonomy is institutionally formalized through the "sanctity of private property," which includes hereditary transfer of ownership through inheritance, establishing a wealthy elite in power across generations. Looks more like neo-feudalism.
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How the Supreme Court Is Rebranding Corruption