Remember Bob McDonnell? Once the rising star of the GOP, the former Virginia governor was heavily speculated to be a presidential hopeful. Then he was convicted in 2014 on corruption charges because of his acceptance of loans and gifts from a political supporter, and sentenced to two years in prison in January 2015. McDonnell is appealing that sentence, and his appeal is going all the way to the Supreme Court, where it will be heard Wednesday. What's the basis of his appeal? The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision means all those loans and gifts were not corruption at all.
The former governor argues that the charges against him should be thrown out, pointing to the court's ruling in Citizens United where the court's majority rejected the notion that political favors are always equivalent to criminal corruption. If the court agrees with McDonnell, prosecutors might have a more difficult time going after public corruption in the future. […]
McDonnell says that if his conviction is allowed to stand, just about anything an elected official does in the course of his work—like "inviting donors to the White House Christmas Party"—could qualify as an "official act" under the bribery statute. "These laws threaten First Amendment rights by transforming every campaign donor into a potential felon," McDonnell argues in his brief. "This is a constitutional minefield."
To support his argument, McDonnell cites Citizens United, in which the court ruled that "ingratiation and access...are not corruption." The justices were notably skeptical in that case of campaign finance reformers' arguments that limits on corporate political spending were a necessary defense against corruption, nor did they buy that cozy relationships between donors and politicians were necessarily corrupt. They wrote that campaign contributions "embody a central feature of democracy—that constituents support candidates who share their beliefs and interests and candidates who are elected can be expected to be responsive to those concerns." McDonnell's lawyers are clearly hoping to appeal to that sentiment here.
Will that fly with a 4-4 Supreme Court? It's not at all clear, since there are elements of the case and precedence here that go beyond the straightforward Citizens United argument, and the remaining eight justices have split different ways in these cases. There's also a foundational problem in McDonnell's argument that the federal government highlighted in its brief to the court. "The bribes at issue here were personal payoffs, not campaign contributions," the brief points out. The $175,000 McDonnell and his wife got was a personal loan, not a campaign contribution, and the other gifts—rides in a Ferrari, custom golf bags—didn't having anything to do with McDonnell's campaign fund.