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Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

It's bizarre seeing the outright bribery.

A lot of things that people call "bribery" is really just ensuring that your preferred candidate gets in office. You couldn't give money directly to the candidate for personal use. Donations went to the campaign of the guy who already agreed with you. The FEC used to take a dim view of outright pay-for-service, even dressed up.

This is new. And now people need to decide how they feel about that. They get one chance to say "no, that's not how we do things." Even if the administration suffers a blow this November, if they hear that this is mostly acceptable to their base, it will be what every politician does from here on.

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>A lot of things that people call "bribery" is really just ensuring that your preferred candidate gets in office.

Having a preferred candidate you give money to is already bribery - whatever the law says. You fund your favorite pony to get the power. They then scratch your back or lend a sympathetic ear.

Simply spending money to get someone you like elected isn’t bribery.

To the degree great inequality leads to this being decisive in elections, it is a corrupting influence, but the term for it is still not “bribery”.

But when a presidential candidate tells oil companies they should donate because he is going to help them, that’s solid bribery.

When companies pay to “settle” ridiculous accusations, or “donate” to a president’s causes, while their mergers or other business legal issues depend on an openly pay-for-play president’s goodwill, that’s solid bribery.

The country’s policies, discipline, reputation and competence (economic, diplomatic and political) are being sold off for a tiny fraction of what their future adjusted value is worth.

In actual functioning democracies political donations are capped severely.

Say, a single donor can contribute a maximum of €6,000 per parliament candidate per election.

Yes, that's a real limit.

We used to have laws like that, but apparently our supreme court believes that bribing politicians is political speech, and curtailing that speech is unconstitutional, so...

It's so broken.

Are you aware that the Citizens United case was actually about a movie? It wasn't about handing someone a stack of cash. When I see perspectives like yours, I wonder what you would say is the right way to handle the question of whether someone can make a movie that portrays a candidate in a positive or negative light. It seems to be pretty clearly a matter of free speech (first amendment), so unless there's some other provision of the constitution that would override that, I don't see how it could be forbidden.

To the extent that a pretty big chunk of donations are used to fund very short movies (we call them ads) for or against candidates, I'm not sure how that can be distinguished. I could see how one would distinguish get-out-the-vote or other similar non-speech type activities, but those on the Left seem to not oppose such expenditures.

The conversation included money-corrupted political speech vs. bribery.

The Citizen's United case being relevant to the former.

That’s a profoundly incorrect misunderstanding of the Citizens United decision, which was to remove restrictions on political spending by corporations.

In other words, by your distinction, the decision was about stacks of cash, not movies.

A case regarding a movie was indeed brought to the court. The court decided to make a far more expansive decision. The movie became a footnote, and has effectively no meaningful relationship to the court’s final decision or its impact.

As for getting lost in a discussion about the difference between an ad and a movie, that’s really going down a rabbit hole of deliberately missing the point completely. Some word play is just too divorced from reality to engage with. There are many very short movies, and any rational person would be able to distinguish them from ads to a high degree of accuracy.

Before CU, "issue ads" were constrained not to mention a candidate. They could talk about the issues, and strongly hint at which candidate did what they wanted, but it couldn't instruct you on who to vote for.

Now all that's required is a thin fig leaf that you're not actually directly coordinating with the actual campaign. And even that much is never enforced. It almost completely undoes campaign limits.

Except for clusters of highly correlated private interest groups. PACs. Which completely circumvent that.

Ideally they "shouldn't". But in practice they do.

Because the Supreme Court determined that money is free speech, its use in elections cannot be limited in general.

And where coordination between purportedly independent groups isn't supposed to happen, there is a strong "don't ask, don't tell" code, and a mountain of lawyers ready to scream "political oppression!" on the dime of the rich.

Citizens United assured that will never happen in the US, and everything critics said about it 16 years ago has come into fruition and more.

Roberts will certainly go down as the most consequential Chief Justice in several generations… the havoc he’s wrought is just remarkable.

> Simply spending money to get someone you like elected isn’t bribery.

Alright then what should it be called, because it's also not democracy.

I agree, but coding that up in law turns out to be tricky. Americans are reluctant to pass laws about how you can spend your money, especially if that money is being spent to express your opinion.

We used to have some limits on it, but now it's trivial to bypass those limits because the Supreme Court decided that the First Amendment isn't limited (except for all of those other limits.)

IANAL, IIRC: SCOTUS has very narrowly defined bribery as explicit quid pro quo. And sometimes not even then.

You recall correctly.

And they did so, so they could take bribes with no consequences as long as they take them the right way.

>And they did so, so they could take bribes with no consequences as long as they take them the right way.

Yep. cf. Snyder v. United States[0]

[0] https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/supreme-court-limits-scop...

Trevor Noah pretty much nailed this in the first Trump admin:

https://x.com/thedailyshow/status/1177221786720559105

https://xcancel.com/thedailyshow/status/1177221786720559105

In what sense is this new, other than a different side cares about the optics?

OP explained it clearly: “you couldn’t $1, now you can”. It would be helpful if you explained which part did you not understand. Alternatively, that barking sound I hear might be a sea lion.

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