For once, Chicago's legendary corruption isn't the biggest news story of the day.
Let's start with New York, where the Adams administration seems determined to set new standards for public corruption, going so far as to float the "we're only a little bit criminal" defense:
The indictment alleged that, for years, starting during his tenure as Brooklyn borough president, Adams had cultivated a relationship with a representative of the Turkish government who arranged for him to receive some $123,000 worth of illegal gifts, such as discounted business-class tickets on Turkish Airlines and a stay in the Bentley Suite at the St. Regis in Istanbul. When Adams ran for mayor, his Turkish supporters allegedly channeled illegal donations to his campaign through straw donors with the connivance of Adams himself. In return, prosecutors say, Adams performed a number of favors as a public official, most notably pressuring FDNY inspectors to certify that the new Turkish Consulate near the U.N. was safe without conducting the necessary inspections.
The mayor’s defenders described all this as a whole lot of nothing. His defense attorney, Alex Spiro, ridiculed the indictment, calling it the “airline-upgrade corruption case,” and filed an immediate motion to dismiss the bribery charge, citing a recent Supreme Court decision that enlarged the bounds of acceptable gift taking. (He had less to say about the foreign donations.)
At the other end of the Acela, retired US District Court Judge Nancy Gertner and Georgetown law professor Stephen Vladeck warn the US Supreme Court that they are losing credibility, and thus, farther down the road, the power to do their jobs:
We have both been critical of the current justices for how their behavior, both on and off the bench, has undermined public faith in the court. Too many of its most important rulings can be chalked up to nothing more than the fact that Republican presidents appointed six of the justices, and Democrats appointed only three. And then there are the alarming ethical lapses of two of the six justices in the majority — lapses that have close connections to their relationships with right-wing megadonors.
A court that loses its institutional credibility is a court that will be powerless when it matters most.
A court without legitimacy is a court unable to curb abuses of political power that its rulings may well have enabled. It is a court that will be powerless when the next Chip Roy calls for disobedience because it will have long since alienated those who would otherwise have defended it. It would become a court powerless to push back against the tyrannies of the majority that led the founders to create an independent judiciary in the first place.
Will Republican Justices Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch heed the warnings? Probably not. At least Special Counsel Jack Smith seems to have figured out how to get around some of their illegitimacy:
Smith’s filing tries to slice through the Court’s security shield regarding the insurrection. Skillfully quoting from or alluding to language in the Court majority’s own opinion, the filing demolishes the notion that Trump’s activities, culminating on January 6, deserve immunity. Outwardly, Smith’s filing respects the Court’s dubious ruling about the immunity of official presidential acts. Legally, Smith had no choice but to operate within that ruling, a fact that sharply limited how far his filing could go. But even though it never challenges the conservative majority directly, the filing makes a case, incontrovertible in its logic and factual detail, that the core of Trump’s subversion involved no official actions whatsoever. It persuasively argues, with fact after fact, that Trump was the head of an entirely private criminal plot as a candidate to overthrow the election, hatched months before the election itself.
The crucial point to which the filing unfailingly returns is that none of Trump’s actions listed in the revised indictment, even those that the Court cited as “official,” deserves immunity. As Smith makes clear, the Framers of the Constitution deliberately precluded the executive branch from having official involvement in the conduct of presidential elections. The reason was obvious: Any involvement by a president would be an open invitation to corruption. To make the case that any such involvement falls within a president’s official duties would seem, at best, extremely difficult.
It is here that Smith turns the Court’s Trump v. United States ruling to his own advantage.
Only 28 more days until what I think we can comfortably predict will be the XPOTUS's last election—one way or another. But I think we'll be stuck with corruption for a very long time, until people get fed up with it enough to demand and enforce real anti-corruption laws.