> In ruling for the former mayor, the justices drew a distinction between bribery, which requires proof of an illegal deal, and a gratuity that can be a gift or a reward for a past favor
I see no difference
I see no difference
The law does:
"accepting a bribe as a federal official is punishable by up to 15 years in prison, while accepting an illegal gratuity as a federal official is punishable by up to only 2 years. If the Government were correct that §666 also covered gratuities, Congress would have inexplicably authorized punishing gratuities to state and local officials five times more severely than gratuities to federal officials—10 years for state and local officials compared to 2 years for federal officials. The Government cannot explain why Congress would have created such substantial sentencing disparities."
Then again, if I had gone to Yale or Harvard like most of the SCOTUS justices in the majority, I'd see that as part-and-parcel of existence. There's blue-blood access to government, and then there's the access that you get if you didn't happen to come up in the upper crust of the Eastern seaboard of the US.
Unfortunately for us, the law routinely does see a substantial difference and treats them as such. Due to that, the SCOTUS sees them as different and judges that a law on one is not automatically a law on the other.
In other words, to ban a thing you actually need to specifically ban a thing and not just something that feels ethically like the thing you want to ban.
vs.
I will donate $20k to your reelection campaign if you streamline the approval process.
Clearly the former construction could not possibly construed as an implied bribe and we shouldn't punish those who want to reward our hard working civil servants for their honorable public service. /s
But that's not what is being compared here. The more accurate description would be:
"I am very happy that you streamlined the approval process for my project, so here is $20k."