Supreme Court Appears Hostile to Theft of Honest Services Law

One of the ways that federal prosecutors have gone after corruption recently has been with the theft of honest services law enacted in 1988.

The theory behind the law is that if people are taking bribes, they are depriving the taxpayer of their honest services, and so can be prosecuted.

Well, the initial reports from oral arguments indicate that the Supreme Court is not inclined to support the law in its current form:

Justices across the court’s ideological spectrum took turns on Tuesday attacking the law as hopelessly broad and vague.

Justice Steven G. Breyer estimated that there are 150 million workers in the United States and that perhaps 140 million of them could be prosecuted under the government’s interpretation of the law.

Complimenting the boss’s hat “so the boss will leave the room so that the worker can continue to read The Racing Form,” Justice Breyer said, could amount to a federal crime.

I tend to agree, you saw this law being used by Bush and His Evil Minions^™ to go after political rivals, on the theory that they were stealing their full performance from their state jobs, because they spent a lot of time serving as state legislators …… Funny how everyone prosecuted was a Democrat, and most of them were black.

The downside is that one of the plaintiffs are crooks and corrupt.

The first plaintiff is Conrad Black, the former Hollinger International CEO, who stole from his company and shareholders to finance a lavish lifestyle, and the other plaintiff, Alaska legislator Bruce Weyhrauch, soliciting lucrative employment from VECO at the same time that he was shepherding their requests from the legislator for taxpayer money.^*

Still, seeing how the law has been abused, killing it would be a very good thing.

^*A word about Alaska: The taxpayers in Alaska are basically the oil companies, as Alaska relies on oil revenues, and does not collect state income or sales taxes.