Three recent news items to consider:
Item One. The Washington Post reports that the Clinton Foundation received charitable donations from foreign governments while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. One such donation came from Algeria, which was simultaneously lobbying the State Department for improved relations.
Item Two. The Washington Free Beacon reports that Harry Reid worked behind the scenes to secure billions of dollars in federal loan guarantees for corporate donors to the Clean Energy Project, a nonprofit run by former Reid staffers and campaign officials. The Nevada senator is expected to face a tough reelection battle next year.
Item Three. The New York Times reports that the federal government will bring corruption charges against Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey. The charges have to do with Menendez’s relationship with Dr. Salomon Melgen, who has collected tens of millions from Medicare. The Times alleges that the senator accepted two round-trip flights to the Dominican Republic from Melgen without reimbursing him or properly reporting it. He also is alleged to have “improperly” lobbied Medicare officials to change reimbursement rates in ways that would favor Melgen.
All three items involve the same concern: politicians using their public offices to favor private parties, in exchange for benefits of some sort. In other words, pay to play. With the Clintons, the worry is that the Algerians gave money to their foundation in exchange for favorable policy from State. Meanwhile, Reid actively and proudly worked to secure favorable policy to donors to a charity run by his people. With Menendez, there was no charity involved; he is accused of receiving gifts directly, and then granting favorable policy.
Yet only Menendez is in legal trouble. Why? With Reid and Clinton, the “pay” side of the possible pay to play exchange was submitted to third parties, charities with close connections to the politicians, but sufficiently set apart to keep everything legal.
Little wonder that politicians and interest groups often use charities to advance their personal interests in a perfectly legal manner. For instance, in its heyday, Fannie Mae used the Fannie Mae Foundation to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into charities connected to interest groups and politicians the mortgage giant wanted to cultivate. This was — and still is! — an easy way to peddle influence without breaking the law.
Political corruption is a major problem in our government. We waste hundreds of billions of dollars every year on projects and programs that benefit narrow, well-placed factions over the public interest. Given our country’s persistently weak economic growth as well as the federal government’s structural deficit, waste of this kind is particularly pernicious. Moreover, it saps public confidence from our democratic institutions; for a government that derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, this is a worrying development.
Yet we are chronically incapable of rooting corruption out, and these three examples illustrate a big reason why: we have an incomplete view of what it really is. Implicitly, we are prone to think of it as merely a legal problem — to be handled by prosecutors. And, when they fail to find clear instances of law breaking, the thinking is that there must be nothing to worry about.
But that only captures a tiny portion of activity that should be thought of as corrupt. In my new book, A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption, I take a broader view of the issue. Yes, corruption certainly includes law breaking, but it is so much more than that. As I write in the preface:
In the 1890s, as Congress was writing tariff laws governing sugar, Pennsylvania’s political boss, Senator Matthew Quay, admitted that, yes indeed, he was speculating in the sugar markets, that he would go right on doing so even as he voted on the sugar tariff, and there wasn’t a damned thing anybody could do about it, thank you very much. He was right. A decade later, William Randolph Hearst exposed his successor, Boies Penrose, as being on the take from Standard Oil. Nothing came of it, and Penrose was reelected several times thereafter. He died in office.
Why did nothing happen to those men? Simple: they were not breaking the laws of their day. That is the fascinating feature about corruption—often, it has absolutely nothing to do with illegal activity. There are plenty of ways…to be corrupt without being criminal. More often than not, the criminals merely lack self-control or self-awareness. That makes them easy targets for rebuke, and thus reasons to feel good about ourselves and our government.
But as Quay and Penrose prove, the law often has trouble keeping up with corruption, in no small part because the people who write the laws like it that way.
George Washington Plunkitt — a boss of Tammany Hall 100 years ago — called this type of behavior “honest graft.” He defined it as, “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.” It boils down to this: there are perfectly legal ways for politicians to use their public powers to favor themselves, their friends, or their benefactors; politicians simply have to figure out what the law happens to allow and what it happens to forbid, and trim their sails accordingly.
Honest graft is a moving target. What Quay, Penrose, and Plunkitt did more than 100 years ago is outlawed today. But honest graft just moves on to something else — as politicians see new (perfectly legal) opportunities, and take them instead. It is impossible to get rid of honest graft because it hinges upon operating within the “controlling legal authority,” as Al Gore inartfully put it. As the laws change, so too does honest graft.
This is why we’ll never solve the problem of corruption if we think of it as purely a legal issue. For instance, we could tighten the legal restrictions on nonprofits connected to politicians. We could render illegal the practices that the Clinton and Reid groups engaged in. But new rules inevitably create new loopholes, which politicians then exploit. Redefining what is illegal will only shift the ways politicians misuse their power legally.
Of course, politicians who do what Menendez is accused of doing should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But those who act corruptly within the parameters of the law can only be brought to account by the people, at the ballot box. There is no other way.
Jay Cost is a staff writer at the Weekly Standard. His new book, A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption, is now available.
