Comment by daedrdev

What do you have against proportional representation?

> They literally weakened the legislation.

IMO that's not the case, because if a legislation looses its intended focus, it gains a lot of arbitrariness in return. The more interpretations you consider valid, the more options you can choose from when applying it.

So, obviously, the legislation had to be returned to a single interpretation, the one Congress intended (or the one the court thinks is the best if you believe courts should hold legislative power).

Which leads directly to the second issue: Which was the interpretation Congress intended?

> From dissent of disagreeing SCOTUS justice: "absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one only today’s Court could love."

The majority opinion analyses this issue with 6 different approaches, including a textual one, arriving at similar conclusions from each.

The dissenting opinion on the other hand argues, that all other approaches but the textual one should be rejected.

The dissenting opinion's textual interpretation strongly asserts, that Congress intended with "accepts or agrees to accept, anything of value from any person, intending to be influenced or rewarded" to address both bribes (intending to be influenced) and gratitudes (intending to be rewarded).

The majority opinion argues that if you were to divorce the concept of a reward from the prior intent during the influenced/rewarded actions in a statute that criminalizes accepting something of value rather than the intent itself (because how would that even be possible?), you end up with a situation in which being promised something of value, but only receiving it after the influenced actions have been completed, would no longer fulfill the requirements to be considered a bribe.

Basically the majority argues that if they are correct (666 being a bribery rather than a combined bribery + gratitudes statute), Congress still would have had to use language at least equivalent to the one at hand and therefore additional tests to deduce the intent of the 99th Congress can not be disregarded.

The difference is that a teacher is on government payroll, while politicians, at least those in the Congress are not.

And when I was a teacher that was strict guidelines on what gifts you can receive. Usually under a certain limit it’s fine. If it is too expensive you have to report it.

Not really, because that's the core issue had hand, but I might not have made my intention with the argument sufficiently clear.

The question the court looked at: Did Congress intend "receiving gifts as a bribe" and "receiving gifts as gratitude" to be two separate crimes for non-federal employees as it is the case for federal ones (In which case handling the issue would have been left up to the states)?

The majority opinion refused to consider the moral argument (although they snuck it in in their argument on a lack of fair notice), but IMO that's by far the most intuitive one, when you allow yourself to look at the problem from the legislative perspective. By looking at the extremes it becomes very clear that there are two very different problems:

Imagine a group of students doing much better than their peers on their final exam thanks to the efforts of their teacher and they gift him a "Best teacher ever" mug.

But now reverse the causality:

Imagine a teacher demanding to be gifted a "Best teacher ever" mug before putting extra effort into preparing his students for their final exam. The group that gifted him the mug does much better than their peers as a result.

IMO these should be two very different crimes, but there is also a valid argument that they are about equivalent, as pursued by the dissenting opinion.

But that's not something a court should legislate.