Can Candidates Run for Office Without Taking Bribes?

“If there’s a problem, don’t use Bruce Young as a sacrificial lamb. If you feel something is wrong, tighten up the rules.”

These words, spoken to the jury by a defense lawyer in the recent criminal trial of former Assemblyman Bruce Young, may be discounted as self-serving. Still, the Young case presents a good occasion for asking whether we need to tighten the rules that apply to the campaign practices of legislators.

Young’s conviction under the federal mail statute was based on his failure to report personal income and campaign contributions as required by the California Political Reform Act. These are serious offenses. But the place to start in any inventory of state corruption laws is the crime that lies at the very heart of political corruption: bribery.

Bribery is widely believed to be too narrow an offense to be an effective weapon against most corruption. For example, many people imagine that the crime of bribery cannot extend to campaign contributions, or that public officials and lobbyists can avoid bribery charges by avoiding an explicit agreement that a particular vote on a bill will be exchanged for a gift or contribution.

In fact, the opposite is more nearly the case. The reach of the bribery statutes is not at all narrow, and the major impediment to bribery prosecutions is not that so few political transactions are bribes, but that so many of them are.

The California bribery statute, reduced to its essence, applies to “anything of value or advantage, given or accepted, with a corrupt intent to influence, unlawfully, the person to whom it is given, in his (official) action, vote or opinion.”

A campaign contribution is certainly something of “value or advantage,” and there is nothing to suggest that it is not covered by the bribery statutes.

It is also clear that no explicit agreement to exchange a contribution for a legislative vote is needed. A bribe occurs when an interest group or a lobbyist makes a contribution with the “intent” that the legislator be influenced.

There are undoubtedly some interest-group contributions that are made purely to help a candidate get elected, without the intention of influencing the candidate’s official conduct when he is in office. Such contributions are perfectly legal. But the great majority of contributions are made at least partly to influence the legislators. These are bribes.

Not many observers will deny that most interest-group contributions are made with the intent of gaining influence. It is difficult otherwise to explain the many groups that contribute to incumbents and other likely winners across the partisan and ideological spectrum. Even harder to explain are the many contributions made to winners after the election is over. A dramatic example occurred in Texas a few years ago, when a gubernatorial candidate received 90 contributions, each for $10,000 or more, shortly after his upset victory.

Apologists for the present system say that interest groups contribute only to get access to legislators, not to influence their votes. No evidence is ever offered for this unlikely hypothesis, but even if it were true, the contributions would still be bribes. The purpose of access, after all, is to influence the legislator’s official conduct. Given the great demands on a legislator’s time, the decision of whom to listen to on a controversial matter may itself be an official “action” under the bribery law.

What is the best way to react to the fact that under the law most of our legislators accept bribes routinely?

One reaction would be to change the bribery law. Under our present system most legislators have no choice but to accept interest-group contributions if they want to stay in office. If we are unwilling to change the system, it makes little sense to declare felonious the conduct into which our officials are forced.

A second possibility is to continue looking the other way while bribery lodges itself securely at the core of our politics.

Those who believe that democracy can be made to work will not be satisfied with either of these choices. There is a third possibility: Reform our system to make it possible for candidates to run for office without accepting bribes.

The most important single reform is to limit the total amount that a candidate can accept from all interest groups. If such a limit is placed low enough, the ability of any interest group to apply pressure through its contributions will be minimal.

Reform will not be free. The special-interest money that is restricted must be made up from some other source, very likely the public treasury. But the cost of a well-conceived program, such as the one sponsored by the California Commission on Campaign Financing, is very modest.

As often happens when there is a scandal, the Bruce Young trial has prompted California legislators to talk about the reform of campaign financing. Critics claim that reform will benefit incumbents, but the opposite is true. Legislators have enjoyed high rates of reelection under the bribe-based system. That is why citizens will need to apply some heat if the talk of reform is to turn into action.