> 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
"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."
Even if there is some sort of difference, all it does is reinforce the impression that you need money to maintain relationships with those in politics.
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.
I agree. There's no moral or ethical difference in any way.
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.
I would be very happy if you streamlined the approval process for my project.
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
"Here is my project that's being held up by a slow approval process, btw, here is $20k for the great job you did on ${insert random unrelated former act they did}"
Facilitation payments, which as near as I can tell are line jumping bribes for things like approval processes, are specifically carved out as an exception to the US anti-bribery laws.
I see no difference