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Corruption, Bribery, and Public Confidence

In my graduate program, most of the PhD students shared a single communal office. At the end of the semester, when we had papers to write and exams to grade, it was common for us to do our work in the office – a show of silent solidarity and an offering of mutual moral support. On one such occasion a colleague of mine, call her M, was working in the office when one of her students came by. This student wanted to thank her for the semester and offered her a gift card.

M, however, refused the gift. The graduate students at Binghamton University are employees in the State University of New York system, thus, state employees. As part of ethics regulations in New York, state employees and elected officials are prohibited from accepting gifts of greater value than 15 dollars. I suspect that, the law aside, M may have refused the gift anyway. As educators, we were tasked with grading student materials as fair and unbiased as possible. As informed people, we were aware that factors such as the desire to reciprocate a good deed or to treat people you like well may shape judgments in unconscious ways. As philosophers who study morality, we were predisposed to have a concern for, and the ability to find, ethical violations.

On Sunday, May 11th, ABC News reported that the Trump Administration is preparing to accept a gift of a Boeing 747-8, worth about $400 million, from the Qatari royal family. The report further elaborated that the administration’s intention is to use the jet as the new Air Force One through the remainder of President Donald Trump’s term – which would require a retrofit process that could take multiple years and cost nearly one billion dollars. Ownership would be transferred to Trump’s presidential library before the end of his term, with the Air Force covering any costs associated with the transfer. When questioned on the ethical implications of accepting the plane, Trump noted that only a “stupid person” would refuse a “free, very expensive airplane.”

Critics contend that accepting the plane, particularly with the intention to transfer ownership to the Trump presidential library, would violate the Emoluments Clause of the United States Constitution. Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution states that “no person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince or foreign State.” Congress has not approved receipt of the plane from the Qatari royal family and it is hard to see the plane as anything but a gift.

However, the moral critiques have been more varied than legal critiques. In its initial reporting, The New York Times said receipt of the plane “rais[es] substantial ethical issues.” Similarly, the outlet described a plan for the top holders of $TRUMP, a meme coin marketed by the President and his family, to privately dine with the President and tour the White House as a “foreign influence opportunity.” However, some other news outlets, politicians, and even Trump supporters have described these acts as bribery and corruption. Eric Lipton, reporter for The New York Times, defended his outlet’s framing, contending that “corruption requires explicit quid pro quo” thus stating that corruption is effectively only limited to bribery.

Lipton is correct, to some extent. We should be careful about how we refer to the receipt of a jet, perks for owners of the president’s cryptocurrency, and the president’s sons striking business deals across the Middle East in the days leading up to the president touring the region. Without evidence of an explicit quid pro quo – I’ll give you that if you support this policy – we cannot know for certain that these are bribes. For instance, we cannot be absolutely sure that the Trump administration reaching a deal to allow the UAE access to advanced AI chips from companies such as Nvidia was an exchange for the approval of a new Trump tower in Dubai, announced a week prior. Perhaps it is merely a coincidence.

But to limit corruption to bribery is to give an impoverished account. Bribes are a species of, not a synonym for, corruption. For instance, suppose a mayor had the final decision about which company would receive a contract to renovate a public building. Imagine that the mayor decided to award the contract to a construction company recently founded by his brother. This occurs despite contractors with a long history of successful work offering more competitive bids. This is plainly corruption, even if his brother did not offer the mayor something in exchange for this contract.

As this example shows, corruption is not just arranging quid pro quos. Corruption occurs whenever a public official/employee makes decisions based on private interests, preferences, or feelings, rather than the demands of the office/position. The mayor awards the contract to his brother, not for the good of the town, but because it aligns with his private goals. M demonstrated a lack of corruption not because her student offered the card in exchange for a good grade, but rather because accepting the gift card could affect her ability to function impartially in her role.

Of course, one might contend that accepting a gift does not necessitate that one’s private interests, preferences, or feelings will shape one’s decisions. Perhaps some individuals are especially integrous and will not let gifts sway their opinions. Indeed, one might even contend that publicly accepting gifts is a good thing – Speaker of the House Mike Johnson defended acceptance of the plane arguing, in part, that because it is happening “out in the open” there is not a cause for concern. The idea here might be that openly accepting a gift invites the public to carefully scrutinize decisions that an official makes regarding the party that gave the gift. This would not occur if the gift were a product of a backroom deal.

However, this argument misunderstands the true danger of corruption. Corruption is not a cause for concern merely if it results in decision makers endorsing policies for private reasons. This is certainly part of the issue. But the larger cause for concern surrounding corruption is that it erodes public confidence in institutions and those that occupy positions of power.

Elected officials and public employees are often referred to as public servants – they are supposed to act in the interests of the public. When they openly receive gifts or profit from decisions that they make, the public must now question all subsequent decisions that officials make. As a result, the public loses confidence that decision makers truly have their best interests at heart. This is why the appearance of impropriety or a conflict of interest is as damaging as its actual occurrence; both leave those subject to a decision uncertain that those who made that choice did so for the right reasons.

In 2024, only about 20% of Americans self-reported that they trust the government to do what is right most of the time. In this environment, civic life deteriorates; citizens no longer view the government, even a democratic one, as a cooperative project in which we all engage. They instead view it as something alien, and maybe even hostile, to the citizenry. As a result, it cannot be trusted. The true danger of corruption lies here.

Because of this, there is a sense in which an openly corrupt act is in fact worse than a secretive one. The politician who, say, takes a bribe during a backroom deal seems to acknowledge the severity of the situation. He recognizes that his act is wrong or at least will hurt his public image. Hence its secrecy. But the public figure who openly engages in corrupt acts believes that his acts are not inappropriate or that they will not damage his reputation. This suggests that the damage to public confidence has already been done. Faith and trust in officials has already collapsed. The openly corrupt acts are just the mask falling off.

Perhaps, then, what openly corrupt acts demand is not merely a response to those offenses. What they may demand is a response to all instances, large or small, where citizens are justified in perceiving that a public official could be placing private interests over those of the public. When a candidate for chair of the DNC declares that his party only takes money from the good billionaires, when $15 billion dollars of private funding were spent on political campaigns in 2024, when a bi-partisan group of senators sold literal millions of dollars of stock prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and numerous bills banning congressional stock trading fail to even reach the floor despite overwhelming public support, restoring public confidence in the integrity of elected officials may require addressing all potential sources of corruption. The most severe and flagrant acts may just be the symptom of a larger underlying disease that must be remedied.

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Naming Names: Should Canada Reveal Potential Traitors?

silhouette of Canadian parliament

The ongoing foreign interference scandal in Canada has taken another surprising turn.  Last month, a parliamentary committee released a redacted report indicating that some MPs have “wittingly” assisted in providing confidential information to foreign actors – working on behalf of India and China – and relayed privileged information that might be used to manipulate their fellow parliamentarians. The accusations are serious enough to be considered treason. The dilemma now facing Canadian politicians is whether these names should be made public. What might be the risks to democracy and the rule of law?

The issue of foreign interference has been festering for some time. There have already been personal reports from MPs themselves – such as Micheal Chong and Jenny Kwan – that have revealed Chinese attempts to intimidate and harass. In 2019, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) reportedly warned officials in the Liberal Party about attempts to influence candidates but these alerts were ignored by the party. It is also known that China successfully interfered (although not enough to change the results) in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections in order to help secure a Liberal minority government. In response to calls for an official judicial inquiry into foreign interference, readers may recall that Prime Minister Trudeau delayed the process for months by making up the title of “Special Rapporteur” and designating David Johnson – who at first concluded there ought to be no inquiry before resigning after widespread concerns about his conclusions and an obvious conflict of interest. A judicial inquiry has since been called; however the government has largely refused to cooperate.

Many are now trying to figure out what to do with the little information we do have from this separate parliamentary investigation. On one side is the camp of people who believe that it would be improper to release the names of the suspected traitors to the public until a more thorough investigation can begin. Releasing the names or any other details about the investigation would represent a national security threat in revealing methods of intelligence gathering. Beyond this, the argument against releasing the names seems to largely hinge in the idea of some notion of due process and concerns about reputations. Canada has a complicated history with national intelligence and since the 1980s has separated intelligence gathering and policing, creating a gap between intelligence and evidence, making it difficult to use intelligence as evidence in court. As the deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs recently put it, “intelligence is not truth.”

The fact that official investigations have yet to take place, with no indication that any charges or legal indictments being issued, makes some concerned that releasing the names runs the risk of the process descending into chaos with people being branded without due process of the law. As Green Party Leader Elizabeth May recently stated, “There’s no reason to create an atmosphere of McCarthyism.”

There is also a concern that allegations of being a traitor would irreparably damage an MP’s reputation. As one minister put it, “The obvious potential reputational damage a person might suffer if there’s another side of the story, that must be considered.” Another Liberal MP claims, “Somebody’s career could be totally ruined by a frivolous accusation or a comment…I think that if somebody gets charged, absolutely, OK, there you go. But until that time, let’s be careful but let’s be thorough.”

On the other hand, there are also risks with not releasing the names. For example, among those politicians who have read the unredacted report, the public has heard radically different reactions. Green Party Leader Elizabeth May was “relieved” after reading the report, claiming that there is no list of disloyal MPs. Meanwhile, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh claimed to be “more concerned than ever” after reading the report and stated that the report shows that “a number of MPs” helped foreign states and are “traitors to the country.” What is the public supposed to make of all this?

Certainly it’s true that voters won’t be waiting on legal proceedings to make up their minds if a list gets released. And it would be ideal if we could preserve both the rule of law while also ensuring that voters can be confident in casting their ballot – like, say, knowing whether their MP might be a traitor to the country. Stifling any doubt about the integrity of Canadian elections will be paramount. Even the perception (regardless of the facts) may be damning. If voters cannot trust the process or the candidates, trust in the government, democracy, and the law are bound to suffer.

There is, of course, the risk that potentially innocent MPs have “their reputations unfairly smeared,” and this could real damage – political or otherwise. Though it isn’t as if politicians don’t face false accusations on a regular basis or shy away from unfair attacks on people’s reputations. Besides, the risk of re-electing a traitor may very well be more significant than the risk to a few political careers. Which would you rather be wrong about? We should note that McCarthyism featured vague accusations about affiliations with communism and “unAmerican” activities among bureaucrats and cultural figures. By contrast, the present situation concerns a specific set of elected individuals accused of specific acts that threaten to subvert the people’s will.

It also doesn’t help that there is already mistrust about the motivations of the Trudeau administration when it comes to the issue of foreign interference. They have been accused often of not taking the issue seriously – they have stalled efforts to investigate, withheld information from investigators, and criticized the findings of the investigations. Foreign interference has also benefited the Liberal Party at the expense of their political rivals in the not-so-distant past. Currently, Liberals will not commit to removing any MPs from their caucus if they have been found to have engaged in the activities in the report. Even if Trudeau’s government does take the issue seriously (and isn’t implicated), keeping the report a secret builds no trust. After all, what sort of politician would question the conclusions of their own intelligence organizations and call investigations of foreign interference a “witch hunt”?

While political scientists may point to Canada’s high rank on various freedom indexes, many are expressing concern about the future of Canadian democracy in general. In addition to these foreign meddling concerns, there have been a number of worrying events – the unjustified use of the emergencies act, the government’s inaction in the midst of a housing crisis, the rise of neo-feudalism. Canadian democracy is being stressed from all sides. It would be wise not to raise  the level of cynicism and distrust any further.

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Narrowly Defined: Corruption in the Court

photograph of empty suit at podium with money hanging out of jacket pocket

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was revealed by journalists at ProPublica to have received millions of dollars in undisclosed gifts from real estate billionaire and political megadonor Harlan Crow. Failing to disclose was almost certainly in violation of the Ethics in Government Act. Moreover, Harlan Crow had business before the Supreme Court both indirectly as a board member of the American Enterprise Institute and directly via a business partly owned by Crow. When invited before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify on the Supreme Court’s ethical standards, Chief Justice John Roberts declined to appear. Unlike federal judges the Supreme Court has no formal code of ethics, and in a joint statement issued by all nine justices the Court refused to implement an enforceable code of ethics.

This latest scandal follows in the wake of prior ethical concerns about Justice Thomas specifically as well as declining trust in the Supreme Court generally (as discussed previously by the Prindle Post here and here.) The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the matter was held May 2nd and the story is ongoing. Nonetheless, it is worth stepping back to take a broader look at influence peddling and the Supreme Court. For beyond the details regarding this or that justice is a legacy of Supreme Court jurisprudence that has created a narrow understanding of malfeasance – one which merits greater ethical scrutiny: What counts as corruption? How broadly or narrowly should it be defined? Who gets to say?

One significant line of decisions concerns money in elections. In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled on Buckley v. Valeo. This controversial campaign finance decision had far-reaching implications, establishing first, that money is speech, and second, that money in the context of elections can still be regulated to prevent both corruption and the appearance of corruption. This left open the question of just what constitutes corruption and who gets to define it. Some, such as legal scholar Deborah Hellman, have argued that courts should largely defer to elected representatives as the appearance of corruption depends on the official’s role and the institution’s function.

The Supreme Court, however, has often taken a much more active role and tends to define corruption quite narrowly. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), for example, the Court held that corporations and nonprofits could spend unlimited money on political candidates as long as they were not formally coordinating with campaigns. In further campaign finance decisions, the Supreme Court shot down an Arizona law passed by public referendum which sought to limit the influence of money in state elections and loosened limits on individual campaign contributions. Beyond campaign finance, in a unanimous decision in McDonnell v. United States (2016), the Court held that Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell accepting $177,000 worth of gifts from business owner Jonnie Williams, Sr. was not corruption, because Governor McDonnell only returned the favor by facilitating meetings or hosting events, as opposed to, say, implementing a specific executive order in Williams’ interest.

Supreme Court rulings on corruption occur in several legal contexts and cannot be synthesized perfectly. But generally speaking, the current Court appears to consider quid pro quo (“something for something”) corruption as the primary concern. In other words, there needs to be a specific documentable instance in which a public official was offered money or other gifts in exchange for a particular executive, legislative, or judicial action. Moreover, per the Supreme Court, providing political access in exchange for money does not count as quid pro quo.

What concerns might this loose interpretation raise? Why should anyone object?

First, the Supreme Court has prioritized those with resources, namely corporations and the wealthy, by refusing to restrict their political access and spending ability. The Court has been less interested in ensuring that those with less resources have equal access to the political process. In short, their calculus about balancing rights of the powerful with the rights of the less powerful may be off. The political theorist Mark Warren has called attention specifically to the exclusionary dimension of corruption in which people are denied due influence on decisions for which they are impacted by the outcome. The Supreme Court’s lack of concern with selling political access may exacerbate this form of corruption.

Second, the Supreme Court assumes that if a public official is not deliberately doing someone an explicit favor then they have not been influenced, but this is out of step with current psychology. It is well-established that humans are influenced by our social networks and often engage in motivated reasoning, where individuals consciously or unconsciously alter their uptake and analysis of information on the basis of their personal and community biases. Conflicts of interest appear to cause broad, and sometimes unconscious, influence – a problem that cannot be addressed simply by transparency measures. The Supreme Court has attempted to reassure Congress that their decisions are not impacted by gifts. But even if it is true that no justice has deliberately changed an opinion, this does not exclude more subtle forms of influence that come with the territory of being human.

Third, by focusing almost exclusively on quid pro quo corruption, the Supreme Court ignores a larger culture of moneyed influence and pay-to-play politics. It is not always a mystery what the wealthy and powerful want – especially those such as Harlan Crow who are extensively involved in politics. If political officials are allowed to be the beneficiaries of private largesse, they can read the room and see what actions would be well-received – no shady deals necessary. Moreover, in a context where the wealthy are specifically allowed to buy access to the politically powerful (as ruled in McDonnell), quid pro quo corruption is difficult to prevent and detect. Presumably public servants, such as Clarence Thomas, do not provide the courtesy of marking in red ink where they compromised their values.

All these concerns are heightened when it comes to the Supreme Court. Elected officials are supposed to be responsive to their electorate, so there is at least some question as to how to precisely draw the line between reasonable access and undue influence. However, justices are appointed and are supposed to be above the electoral fray. On the basis of this reasoning, the ethics codes covering appointed judges should be more strict than for elected officials, not less so.

The overarching concern is that the Supreme Court has enabled an undemocratic system in which elected officials are not responsive to their voters, and judges are not (reasonably) unbiased decision-makers, but instead both favor the interests of the select few that can afford access. There may be defensible reasons for the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence, however, in light of the Clarence Thomas scandal, one wonders if the Supreme Court’s decades-long crusade against anti-corruptions laws needs to be viewed with renewed suspicion.

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Illocutionary Silencing and Southern Baptist Abuse

black and white photograph of child with hands over mouth, eyes, and ears

Content Warning: this story contains discussions of sexual, institutional, and religious abuse.

On May 22nd, external investigators released an extensive report detailing patterns of corruption and abuse from the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the largest denomination of Protestant Christianity in the United States. According to the report, Southern Baptist leaders spent decades silencing victims of sexual abuse while ignoring and covering up accusations against hundreds of Southern Baptist ministers, many of whom were allowed to continue in their roles as pastors and preachers at churches around the country. In general, the Executive Committee of the SBC prioritized shielding itself and the denomination from legal liability, rather than care for the scores of people abused at the hands of SBC clergy. But, after years of public condemnations of the Committee’s behavior, church representatives overwhelmingly voted in June to investigate the Executive Committee itself.

To anyone who has not been listening to years worth of testimony from SBC abuse victims, there is much in the SBC report to shock and appall.

But in this article, I want to consider one important reason why so many (beyond just the members of the SBC Executive Committee) ignored that mountain of testimony, even despite prominent awareness campaigns about sexual abuse in religious spaces after the USA gymnastics abuse trial and the #MeToo movement (like #ChurchToo): in short, in addition to the abuse itself, many of the people who chose to come forward and speak about their experiences suffered the additional injustice of what philosophers of language call illocutionary silencing.

In brief, philosophers (in the “speech act theory” tradition) often identify three distinct elements of a given utterance: the literal words spoken (locution), the function of those words as a communicative act (illocution), and the effects that those words have after they are spoken (perlocution). So, to use the cliché example, if I shout “FIRE!” in a crowded theater, we can distinguish between the following components of my speech:

    • Locution: A word referring to the process of (often dangerous) fuel combustion that produces light and heat.
    • Illocution: A warning that the audience of the utterance could be in danger from an   uncontrolled fire.
    • Perlocution: People exit the theater to escape the fire.

In general, interpreting a speech act involves understanding each of these distinct parts of an utterance.

But this means that silencing someone — or “preventing a person from speaking” — can happen in three different ways. Silencing someone overtly, perhaps by forcibly covering their mouth or shouting them down so as to fully prevent them from uttering words, is an example of locutionary silencing, given that it fully stops a speaker from voicing words at all. On the other side, perlocutionary silencing happens when someone is allowed to speak, but other factors beyond the speaker’s control convene to prevent the expected consequences of that speech from occurring: consider, for example, how you can argue in defense of a position without convincing your audience or how you might invite friends to a party which they do not attend.

Illocutionary silencing, then, lies in between these cases and occurs when a speaker successfully utters words, but those words (because of other factors beyond the speaker’s control) fail to perform the function that the speaker intended: as a common phrase from speech act theory puts it,

illocutionary silencing prevents people from doing things with their words.

Consider a case where a severe storm has damaged local roadways and Susie is trying to warn Calvin about a bridge being closed ahead; even if Susie is unhindered in speaking, if Calvin believes that she isn’t being serious (and interprets her utterance as a joke rather than a warning) then Susie will not have warned Calvin, despite her best attempts to do so.

So, consider the pattern of behavior from the SBC towards the hundreds of people who came forward to report their experiences of assault, grooming, and other forms of abuse: according to the recent investigation, decades of attempted reports were met with “resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” from SBC leadership who, in many cases, chose to slander the victims themselves as “‘opportunistic,’ having a ‘hidden agenda of lawsuits,’ wanting to ‘burn things to the ground,’ and acting as a ‘professional victim.’” Sometimes, the insults towards victims were cast as spiritualized warnings, such as when August Boto (a longtime influential member of the SBC’s legal team) labeled abuse reports as “a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism. It is not the gospel. It is not even a part of the gospel. It is a misdirection play…This is the devil being temporarily successful.” To warp the illocutionary force of an abuse report into a demonic temptation is an unusually offensive form of illocutionary silencing that heaps additional coals onto the heads of people already suffering grave injustices.

And, importantly, this kind of silencing shapes discursive environments beyond just the email inboxes of the SBC Executive Committee: a 2018 report from the Public Religion Research Institute found, for example, that only one group of Americans considered “false accusations made about sexual harrassment or assault” to be a bigger social problem than the actual experience of sexual assault itself — White Evangelical Baptists.

In the New Testament, Jesus warns about the dangers of hypocrisy, saying “Nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered and nothing secret that will not become known. Therefore whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered behind closed doors will be proclaimed from the housetops” (Luke 12:2-3, NRSVUE). It may well be that, finally, the proclamations by and about the victims of and within the Southern Baptist Convention can be silenced no longer.

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The Melodrama of the United States Postal Service

photograph of rusty mail boxes in rural New Mexico

This article has a set of discussion questions tailored for classroom use. Click here to download them. To see a full list of articles with discussion questions and other resources, visit our “Educational Resources” page.

“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” reads the motto of the United States Postal Service (USPS). But what neither acts of god nor nature can impede, politics can grind to a halt. The USPS has become another among many points of contention between Democratic politicians and the administration of President Donald Trump. But for an institution that predates the United States itself, political struggle is old hat.

The current issue facing the USPS is alleged by the Trump administration to be simply financial. It’s a poorly run business hemorrhaging money, according to new Postmaster-General  Louis DeJoy. Appointed in June 2020, DeJoy previously worked in the private sector as a management consultant for supply chain logistics. His appointment was criticized by Democratic lawmakers as blatantly partisan, as DeJoy is a significant political contributor to the the Republican Party and has never previously worked in the USPS. (New Breed Logistics, of which DeJoy was the CEO at the time of its sale to XPO Logistics, did work extensively with the USPS during DeJoy’s tenure.) Moreover, the restructuring measures DeJoy has executed are being decried as a deliberate effort to suppress voting by sabotaging the viability of mail-in ballots ahead of the November 2020 presidential election. Limits on overtime pay, and a policy of holding until the next day mail that cannot be delivered within scheduled working hours, have led to massive delays to mail service in Philadelphia. Some residents have gone up to three weeks without receiving scheduled deliveries.

USPS financial troubles are not a fiction, and they have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the postal woes are due largely to external factors rather than bad management. In fact, bipartisan legislation burdened the USPS with tremendous financial obligations. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) of 2006, Section 803, requires of the USPS something required of no other institution in the US. The USPS must fully fund the projected future healthcare expenses of retired postal workers each fiscal year. Even this extraordinary requirement wouldn’t have led to such deep financial problems for the USPS, but for the Great Recession of 2007 and the COVID-19 pandemic. Both circumstances depressed the already shrinking volume of letters and first-class mail from which the USPS used to derive much of its revenue.

But the existence of financial problems, whatever their provenance, is a red-herring according to Philip Rubio, historian and author of Undelivered: From the Great Postal Strike of 1970 to the Manufactured Crisis of the U.S. Postal Service. The USPS remains tremendously popular and effective. It delivers many times more items than FedEx and UPS combined, and delivers to many more places than any other service in the US. Rather than thinking of the USPS as a business, Rubio urges that it should be thought of as a public service. It is not meant to be profitable, competitive, or even self-sufficient, but to provide a necessary service and to serve as a tool of federal power. The monopoly the USPS has over the delivery of letters was given to it by Congress between 1845-1850, when they effectively legislated competing courier services out of existence. Without legislative intervention, the USPS would likely have been displaced long ago. But with the support of Congress, the postal service has largely grown and thrived.

This is the crux of the postal melodrama. It is another theater of the conflict between the self-styled champions of free markets and their sworn enemy — government services. The billionaire conservative political donor, Charles Koch, spent years fomenting political action against the USPS. The politically libertarian Cato Institute routinely publishes paeans of postal privatization, calling for the invisible hand to unmake what the US Constitution wrought. As always the argument is that stifling competition is bad: bad for the consumers who might see better service and lower prices; bad for entrepreneurs who might make their fortunes but for being stifled by legislative meddling; and bad for the companies that “benefit” from regulation because they stagnate. Proponents of privatization look at the example of several European nations that have (partly) privatized their post: the Netherlands, Germany, and England for example. Germany’s DeutschePost DHL Group has become a diversified, global company that continues to run a profit, even during the COVID-19 pandemic. Privatization has allowed cost-cutting steps for the postal service in the Netherlands, which stopped Monday delivery due to an overall decline in postal volume — though such changes still have to be approved by Dutch parliament. Why do such changes still have to be ratified by the legislature if the post is private? Because they are still mandated by law to provide universal letter courier services.

Stressing the universal service mandate is the counterargument made by opponents of privatization when they claim the USPS is a public service rather than a business. Without mail delivery many people wouldn’t get their paychecks, medicine, tax forms, family newsletters, etc. While a private company could provide these services, to those willing to pay fair market rate, the question is whether the market should be allowed to dictate the price and availability of such services. Others argue that replacing the trusty old post office with a soulless corporate delivery and logistics firm would eliminate the community binding role that local post offices play in small and rural communities.

But even necessary services, like utilities, are often private companies — both in the United States and abroad. Private companies that provide gas, electricity, and telecommunications services are subject to governmental oversight but still run in order to turn a profit for their owners or shareholders. Both private and public models can work — so the issue is ultimately one of principle. The question to ask is what services do we as a society want to allow to be governed by a principle of profit; and are there any services that it is immoral, or just unwise, to allow to be so governed? Libertarian-minded people will argue, as they are want to do, that any restriction on people entering freely into contracts with each other is morally and politically destructive. Others will counter that this is a nice, abstract fantasy that doesn’t capture the real relations of political and economic power among individuals enmeshed in historic systems of oppression.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic and the political tug-of-war in the US over mail-in-voting, the USPS has been a political target for free-market advocates. The timing of the restructuring of the USPS and subsequent delivery slowdowns strikes many seeking President Trump’s ouster as suspicious. It coincides with his unfounded, but frequently stated, concerns about voter fraud and suggestion that the November 2020 election be delayed. We should all watch intently the continuing saga of the USPS.

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Impeachment as a Means to an End

photograph of Capitol building with U.S. flag flying below the Statue of Freedom

As the House unrolled its impeachment inquiry despite polling evidence that public sentiment was not on its side, a slew of editorials suggested that, as with Watergate, the impeachment proceedings themselves were likely to tip public opinion. So far, poll numbers have not borne fruit. Support for impeachment seems to be eroding as support for Trump inches upward. If the Senate is unlikely to vote for conviction, the best Democrats can do is weaken Trump’s 2020 campaign. If it only seems to be strengthening his support, was impeachment a poorly calculated mistake? Only a shallow understanding of politics, however, should lead us to think that impeachment has been a political failure.

We often think of politics as the art of the possible, assuming that any political ploy that does not aim at straightforwardly achievable policy goals is misguided. But as Simone de Beauvoir already pointed out in 1945, in her “Moral Idealism and Political Realism”, this is to misunderstand what the possible is. Beauvoir struggled with the question of how means and ends relate to each other in politics. The French who collaborated with the Nazi occupation often claimed in their defense that resistance could not succeed and they did what was necessary to save France. They adjusted their means to their ends, believing that collaboration was a bow to inescapable reality.

Beauvoir takes the collaborators to task. A brazen political realism of this sort assumes that the ends and the means are separate. If the end is important enough—the defeat of Nazism, for example—it seems as if any means are good enough. Similarly, if the goal is to remove Trump from office, Democrats should pursue only the strategy best calculated to achieve it; this seemingly commonsense view also arises in voters’ oft-discussed concern with electability as a driving consideration in the primaries. Beauvoir’s response is that the means are not simply technical instruments designed to achieve a distinct outcome; they are part of the outcome.

Removing Trump from office is not in itself the goal. What has occasioned impeachment is this administration’s attempt to reduce American foreign policy to a Soviet-style crony government, where political transactions are carried on through personal influence and shadow policy entirely outside normal channels. Compared to Trump’s other impeachable offenses, like violations of the emoluments clause and obstruction of justice, this one is especially grievous because it redefines our place in the international community. That place has already been severely damaged by our withdrawal from the Paris Accords, violation of the Iran nuclear deal, support for Putin and other autocrats, abandonment of our Kurdish allies, and a host of other diplomatic malversations. But on top of that, and ultimately more politically troubling, it is now clear that U.S. foreign policy is dictated by the political and financial needs of the President and his inner circle. Corruption on this scale is extraordinarily difficult to flush out of domestic affairs once it has set in, but the difficulty is dramatically increased in international affairs, when not only our diplomatic corps but also those of foreign governments become thoroughly compromised.

The struggle for the soul of American politics is not merely a struggle for Trump’s removal. It’s a struggle to restore the idea—however flawed it may be in practice—of America as a moral leader, with the soft power capable of defending human rights, democratic institutions, and the rule of law around the world. In the current political climate, that idea has not merely evaporated; it is actively being replaced by the specter of the U.S. as a world power using its awesome capacity for incentive and disincentive to serve political cronies. This damage cannot be undone simply by changing leadership. It can be undone only through a political transformation.

That transformation isn’t simply a matter of new government. Imagine if a different president were elected in 2020. That might signal that the U.S. is ready for a different diplomatic model, but it would not restore its position of leadership. If that position can be restored, how we get there is crucial. Protest, both by citizens and members of Congress, is important, but it doesn’t signal political change. Government officials must not only pay lip service to fighting corruption, but must also act against it. To have a chance of success at winning back the mantle of moral leadership, the U.S. must show that corruption will not be tolerated. The impeachment hearings must disclose its scope, and future trials must impose consequences.

Beauvoir argues that the means are an ineliminable part of any human end: it matters not only that I receive a trophy, but that I earn it; not only that we have universal health care, but that we as a nation pass it; world peace reached through mass genocide would be a peace stained forever. In the case of impeachment, the hearings are not only a way of getting to a particular political state of affairs. They are crucial to what it could mean to reinstate a polity that both American citizens and foreign governments could rely on, because that polity would be one that is not only ruled by law, but also established and maintained by law.

This isn’t to say that we should turn to an idealism, indifferent to what it is politically possible to accomplish. Beauvoir has some strong words for moral purists whose aims are so lofty that pursuing them with clean hands is impossible, and who thus give up entirely on acting to change the world. What’s possible, however, depends on what we take to be possible. If we were to decide that the only realistic option for returning the U.S. to a rule of law were through elections, keeping quiet about Trump’s wide-scale corruption in the meantime, then what’s possible would be not the reinstatement of the rule of law, but only a change in priorities. If the end is to replace not only the corrupt regime, but also the degraded image of the U.S. on the world stage, only public investigations and trials, shored up by political will, can make that possible.

A U.S. without the Trump presidency would likely be less corrupt than the U.S. with a Trump presidency. By that logic, the removal of Trump, even without impeachment, is better than nothing. But a U.S. that has confronted corruption at the top, exposed it, and put an end to it, is a far stronger and more reliable country. It would be a country that is better equipped to fight such corruption at the top in the future (an important consideration, since allowing corruption to go unchallenged also creates future precedent) as well as one that is more strongly set against corruption in its political orientation and institutions. These two ends, in other words—Trump’s removal without impeachment and Trump’s removal via impeachment—are different from each other, because the means are part of the end result. Even if impeachment fails to lead to removal and Trump is removed instead via elections in 2020, the country would be different than if it had failed to chance impeachment at all, because it will have built the moral and political courage necessary to undertake it. Ultimately, even if Trump wins a second term, it will be in a country that has resisted and not simply capitulated, and thus a better country.

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Elizabeth Warren’s Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act

Elizabeth Warren standing on a podium with a stool, speaking to a crowd while holding a microphone

Elizabeth Warren is the first 2020 Democratic presidential contender to date to have already distinctive policy objectives prior to her campaign. One such goal is tackling corruption. With the sitting President undergoing at least 17 known investigations, Warren’s anti-corruption program seems precisely suited to address America’s flagging reputation. America is so far from the days of the investigation of Jimmy Carter’s peanut farm that the former president himself recognizes the US as an oligarchic state. As Alexandria Ocasio Cortez highlighted recently by illustrating the absence of checks on campaign finance, Donald Trump’s administration appears to be a symptom and culmination of system-wide problems rather than a rogue outlier.

Warren’s bill, the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act, recently introduced into the House, envisions a comprehensive approach to tackling the institutional structure of corruption in American politics on all fronts: legislative, executive, and judicial.

The anti-corruption bill foresees new institutional avenues for achieving these multi-pronged goals. It envisions a freestanding US Office of Public Integrity, with powers to investigate and inflict penalties for corruption and to invoke the Justice Department for serious transgressions. At the executive level, this office would include an Office of the Public Advocate to aid the public to “meaningfully engage in the rulemaking process across the federal government.” This office would also support lawsuits from private citizens to demand accountability from public agencies and corporations.

Warren’s bill also sets judicial reform in its sights: it would require courts to defer to agency interpretations of laws. It conceives more scrupulous oversight for judicial conflicts of interest, and lays out an agenda to increase the diversity of the federal judiciary.

Warren’s proposal also tackles financial conflicts in matters of public interest, enforcing transparency in research that is funded by corporations, and limiting practices that allow corporations to negotiate rule-making in their favor.

Where Warren’s anti-corruption plan seems to put its greatest emphasis is in tackling lobbying. Warren’s bill calls for the elimination of financial conflicts for public officials and prevention of companies from buying government influence. The president, VP, cabinet members and high-level officials would be barred from lobbying for life.

The bill also proposes a tax on excessive lobbying and corruption penalties to “level the playing field” for government agencies. How did America acquire such a bad reputation for corrupt lobbying practices? Lobbying in itself need not be inherently undemocratic or corrupt. There is nothing a priori wrong with interest groups informing lawmakers on particular issues. Critics argue that lobbying veers into corruption either when it is not transparent, or when moneyed interests start to gain ascendancy and drown out the mêlée of interests that intersect in a pluralist democracy.

Lee Drutman proposes that this has become the case for America’s politics. Businesses account for 95 of the 100 biggest lobbying spenders in US politics. Corporations spend more in lobbying than taxpayers do to run the House and Senate combined. In the wake of Citizens United, which deregulated lobbying even further from its already permissive bounds, 29 large corporations spent millions in lobbying in the years 2008-2010 while paying zero to negative income taxes. In the case of General Electric, this resulted in a 4.7 billion tax rebate in this three-year period alone.

These alliances between corporations and politicians do not rest easy with the American public. Only 6 percent of Americans consider lobbyists to be ethical, which places them at a bottom reputational ranking (to get a sense of context, nurses rate at the top and Congress members rank just above lobbyists). There appears to be a growing divide between voters and politicians as conflicts of interest in politics have reached a tipping point in the Trump regime. Has the US fully devolved into an oligarchy, as former President Carter believes? It remains to be seen whether voters possess the political will to instill measures for greater accountability like those proposed by Senator Warren.

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Convicted Officials and State Pensions

In the state of New York, former public officials who have been convicted of misconduct in office can still apply for their pensions. This is due to part of the state constitution in which a public official cannot be removed from the pension system once they are a part of it. As detailed in an op-ed in the New York Times, many legislators and people have questioned whether allowing prisoners to claim their pension is ethical.

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