I am not a lawyer. I know I don’t understand the intricacies and complexities of the US Constitution and federal laws, let alone any of the state laws. So I won’t argue with anyone who tells me it is not my place to criticize the Supreme Court rulings. But I can read. And I believe I still have common sense (although this one is hard to be confident about, as it is not easy for one to maintain their sanity with all the various circus shows happening around the country). So, I think I am allowed to at least express my opinion, based on just common sense, on some of the opinions that are handed down by the Supreme Court. And quite frankly, some of the Supreme Court opinions so outrageously defy common sense that make it very difficult for one to not express their opinion. Today’s ruling by the SCOTUS on a case called “SNYDER v. UNITED STATES” is one of those cases. The following are excerpts from the SCOTUS opinions document on this case, available on the Supreme Court’s website:

In 1984, Congress passed and President Reagan signed a law now codified at 18 U. S. C. §666 that, as relevant here, extended the gratuities prohibition in §201(c) to most state and local officials. Congress reversed course after two years and amended §666 to avoid the law’s “possible application to acceptable commercial and business practices.” H. R. Rep. No. 99–797, p. 30 (1986). As amended, the text of §666 now closely resembles the bribery provision for federal officials, §201(b), and makes it a crime for most state and local officials to “corruptly” solicit, accept, or agree to accept “anything of value” “intending to be influenced or rewarded in connection with” any official business or transaction worth $5,000 or more.

This case involves James Snyder, who is the former mayor of Portage, Indiana. In 2013, while Snyder was mayor, Portage awarded two contracts to a local truck company, Great Lakes Peterbilt, and ultimately purchased five trash trucks from the company for about $1.1 million. In 2014, Peterbilt cut a $13,000 check to Snyder. The FBI and federal prosecutors suspected that the payment was a
gratuity for the City’s trash truck contracts. But Snyder said that the payment was for his consulting services as a contractor for Peterbilt. A federal jury ultimately convicted Snyder of accepting an illegal gratuity in violation of §666(a)(1)(B). The District Court sentenced Snyder to 1 year and 9 months in prison. On appeal, Snyder argued that §666 criminalizes only bribes, not gratuities. The Seventh Circuit affirmed Snyder’s conviction.

Held: Section 666 proscribes bribes to state and local officials but does
not make it a crime for those officials to accept gratuities for their past
acts. Pp. 7–16.
(a) Six reasons, taken together, lead the Court to conclude that §666
is a bribery statute and not a gratuities statute—text, statutory
history, statutory structure, statutory punishments, federalism, and
fair notice. Pp. 7–14.

I am not going to go through the six reasons provided to explain how bribery is different from gratuity, and why the court’s majority believes that, congress, when passing the law in 1984 and then refining it in 1986, really wanted to exclude gratuities from being subject to the provisions of this law. I can imagine the legal basis on which they rest these six reasons to be complex enough that, if one really wants to reach a certain conclusion, they can reverse engineer their way back from the conclusion to a set of historical precedents, statutory history, other similar statutes, or even possibly some conversations rumored to have taken place among the Framers, to justify their conclusion. It is hard to accept that the above opinion is not a result of such an exercise. It does not just defy the common sense. In all honesty, I cannot claim that the Supreme Court majority did not have the common sense to appreciate the absurdity of this ruling. In fact, the one concurring opinion by one of the court’s majority in this case, sounds more like an apology (even though it starts with “Call it what you will”), by resorting to the argument that

But the bottom line is that, for all those reasons, any fair reader of this statute would be left with a reasonable doubt about whether it covers the defendant’s charged conduct. And when that happens, judges are bound by the ancient rule of lenity to decide the case as the Court does today, not for the prosecutor but for the presumptively free individual.

I particularly like the word “ancient” above. I am sure this was not the intended implication, but it awfully sounds like something that one would want to avoid in favor of more recent wisdom.

The difficulty I feel about comprehending this decision is not with the fact that it defies common sense, but with the amount of legal gymnastics that the court’s majority have gone through to justify their decision. As mentioned in the dissenting opinion by the court’s minority in this case:

To reach the right conclusion we need not march through various auxiliary analyses: We can begin—and end—with only the text. See National Assn. of Mfrs. v. Department of Defense, 583 U. S. 109, 127 (2018). We “understan[d] that Congress says in a statute what it means and means in a statute what it says there.” Hartford Underwriters Ins. Co. v. Union Planters Bank, N. A., 530 U. S. 1, 6 (2000) (internal quotation marks omitted).

But I believe the implications of this ruling are going to be much more severe than just defying common sense, or allowing someone to get away with bribery by erring on the side of lenity. It is true that gratuities are not obligatory but rather tokens of appreciation. But tell that to the server that serves your food at a restaurant, if you are really not in the mood to go out of your way to make an optional payment, especially if you are not particularly impressed by the food you had. This is because, although we may call it optional, the entire restaurant industry is built around this “optional” payment. The servers expect a gratuity from the people whom they serve, and rightfully so, even if the customer is not really happy with the way their food was prepared. This expectation is not a contract. It is not even a verbal agreement. It is simply built into the system. Everybody, at both ends of these “optional” transactions, know that they need to take place. And of course, it is not bribery, it is simply a token of appreciation.

Now imagine a near future in which, based on the above ruling, the practice of paying gratuities to the state officials, and maybe even federal officials, legislators, judges and court staff, or even Supreme Court Justices becomes similarly commonplace. Of course, I am exaggerating to emphasize the severity of the consequences, but you get what I mean. In that future, when all these officials, similar to the restaurant servers’ situation that I described above, expect an “optional” gratuity from their constituents or patrons in order to provide their obligatory services, there will not be any need for a contract or arrangement, or even a verbal agreement, between a mayor and various truck companies to know that whichever truck company receives the contract, will be expected to pay an “optional” gratuity to the mayor. Maybe even the mayor can infer, by simply considering the sizes of the different truck companies, that the one with the largest size and financial means will likely be more “grateful” if they receive the contract. I don’t know about you, but to me, this doesn’t seem much different than a bribe.

I don’t mean to be disrespectful, and am mentioning this only as a joke at the end of this potentially very boring post, and for the hypothetical scenario that I described above, but one may wonder when the court’s majority will receive their gratuities from the former mayor or the truck company, of course not as a bribe, but simply as a completely optional and innocent token of appreciation.