As a former mayor of Portage, Indiana, James Snyder will forever remain known for three things:

First, steering $1.1 million in city business to Great Lakes Peterbilt for the purchase of five garbage trucks in 2013.

Second, receiving a $13,000 “consulting fee” from Great Lakes Peterbilt in 2014.

Third, getting the Supreme Court to pretend the “consulting fee” wasn’t a bribe.

The extent of Snyder’s “consulting” appears to have been showing up at Great Lakes Peterbilt and telling its owners “I need money.” Dealership employees denied any “consulting” ever took place, nor could Snyder produce any contracts, invoices, or work product to back his “consulting” claim when federal investigators started sniffing around. The dealership’s controller testified that the money was a reward for “an inside track.” Snyder stood convicted of violating 18 U.S. Code §666 — “theft or bribery concerning programs receiving Federal funds.”

On June 26, the US Supreme Court reversed Snyder’s conviction.

In a bizarre majority opinion authored by associate justice Brett Kavanaugh, the court held that payment for “consulting” that never happened wasn’t a “bribe” in violation of §666, but a mere “gratuity” not covered by said statute.

Let’s have a look at that statute. It applies to:

“Whoever … being an agent of an organization, or of a State, local, or Indian tribal government, or any agency thereof …. corruptly solicits or demands for the benefit of any person, or accepts or agrees to accept, anything of value from any person, intending to be influenced or rewarded in connection with any business, transaction, or series of transactions of such organization, government, or agency involving any thing of value of $5,000 or more.”

Snyder secured $1.1 million in business for Great Lakes Peterbilt.

Then Snyder “solicited” a “reward” and tried to cover it up with false “consulting fee” claims.

Seems like an airtight case … but the majority opinion uses worries about the absence of a set of bright lines to distinguish “innocuous” or “obviously benign” gratuities from “criminal” gratuities  to justify overturning Snyder’s conviction.

Writing in dissent, associate justice Ketanji Brown Jackson notes that “§666 was not designed to apply to teachers accepting fruit baskets, soccer coaches getting gift cards, or newspaper delivery  guys who get a tip at Christmas. … We know this because, beyond requiring acceptance of a reward, §666 weaves together multiple other elements (that the Government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt), which collectively do the nuanced work of sifting illegal gratuities from inoffensive ones.”

Why the perverse majority ruling? Your guess is as good as mine, but my guess is:

After getting caught accepting millions of dollars worth of bribes … er, “gratuities” … and “forgetting” to disclose them, certain among the justices would like to get the most lenient possible precedents in place versus their own potential future comeuppance.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

When, in the course of human events, it becomes obvious to all that the current American political system bears little if any resemblance to the values put forward in the 13 colonies’ July 4, 1776 Declaration of Independence, it’s time to consider doing away with “Independence Day” as a positive commemoration.

But not, I hold, worthy of cancellation as a holiday altogether.

The Declaration still has some pretty good bones to base a holiday on, and who doesn’t love a day off work for grilling out and playing with explosives?

Instead of celebrating the Big Lie that we live under a government which exists to “secure” our rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” we’d do well to instead turn our attention to a Festivus-style “airing of the grievances.”

The Declaration is chock-full of such grievances. It includes no fewer than 27 of them, many at least as relevant to today’s “independent” America as they were to Britain’s American colonies.

Let’s try just three of those grievances on for size.

“He [King George III] has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither …”

Sound familiar? No, America isn’t “full” — it enjoys a lower population density than Manhattan-like urbs such as Afghanistan and Yemen. Yet the US government has imposed a 100-mile wide “constitution-free” zone along the borders to facilitate its abuctions, cagings, and deportations of immigrants.

“He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”

The federal government currently employs 2.95 million Americans — half a million more than the entire population of the 13 colonies in 1776. Most of them, most of the time, are up to no good.

“He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power.”

The last time the US was legally at war was 1945 … but for some reason the US government keeps more than two million persons under arms, scattered across more than 300 military bases domestically and another thousand or more abroad. All at your expense, of course.

As to the “civil power,” politicians who don’t bow, scrape, and scurry to shovel money and power at the armed forces on demand are rare as hens teeth and ineffectual when they do turn up.

But wait — there’s more! Give the Declaration of Independence a read sometime and ask yourself whether it’s really produced results superior to the situations it decries.

Let’s move Festivus from December 23 to July 4, re-air the Declaration’s grievances … and do something about them.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“If he returns to the White House,” Bloomberg reports, “Donald Trump has pledged to enact a 10% across-the-board tariff on imports that he says will raise billions of dollars in revenue to pay for more tax cuts.” He’s even floated the idea, per CNBC, of an “all tariff policy” and elimination of the federal income tax.

Think tanks of pretty much every stripe — from the “left-wing” Center for American Progress to the “centrist” Peterson Institute for International Economics to the “libertarian” Cato Institute agree: The math doesn’t work. It would take some pretty insane tariff levels to “pay for” elimination of the income tax. And you’d likely pay more in tariffs than you used to pay in income tax.

Republican National Committee spokesperson Anna Kelly wants you to believe that “the notion that tariffs are a tax on US consumers is a lie pushed by outsourcers and the Chinese Communist Party.”

She’s the one who’s lying. “Protectionism” doesn’t “protect” you — it protects the revenues of domestic businesses with friends in Washington, and it does so at the expense of anyone and everyone who buys the “protected” items.

A 60% tariff on a $1 Chinese item means you either pay $1.60 for that Chinese item … or $1.59 for the American version that used to cost $1.29 (if American companies bothered to make it at all). Tariffs make you, and foreign manufacturers, poorer so American manufacturers can get richer without having to compete for your patronage on price.

But let’s get to a bigger lie: The notion that tax cuts have to be “paid for.”

When a politician uses that phrase, he or she means that if the government isn’t taking a dollar from you, it must get that dollar somewhere else.

That’s not a “cost.” The dollar in question doesn’t belong to the government in the first place. It’s a dollar the government wants, not a dollar it has.

If I don’t break into your car and steal your stereo, I don’t have to find a way to “pay for” not having your stereo. My lack of a stereo is not a “cost” to me. It’s just you keeping what’s yours instead of me taking it.

Then there’s the biggest lie: The notion that “tax cuts” are really even on the table.

The only way for taxes to go down is for spending to go down … and the politicians bragging about “tax cut” proposals clearly have no intention of reducing their spending.

The “national debt”  stands at not quite $35 trillion, with another $2 trillion to be added this year. Every dollar of debt and deficit represents taxes the government has promised to take out of your hide, and your descendants’ hides, in perpetuity, with interest. It’s just another tax,  with payment partially deferred.

Government spending is a lot like the three-card monte card, without the prospect that you’ll even occasionally be allowed to win. And Trump’s proposals are just another variant of that game, not a plan to reduce the amount he and his cronies steal from you.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY