Bribery by definition is illegal, but also requires proving intent.
There are legal ways to influence an outcome through actions, and as long as the intent is never proven as quid pro quo, it’s legal.
But I think most people would define that second paragraph as “bribery” even though in a legal definition is not.
I didn’t bribe you, I gave a house to your mom. That’s totally different.
Excuse me while I pay your nephew’s way through school. Again, not a bribe to you. I’ll explain it when the private jet picks you up en route to my island.
Yeah, I mean loaning Thomas the money to buy the RV and then forgiving the loan is certainly more creative than just giving him the RV. Whether it’s within the bounds of the law I couldn’t say.
But like with the nephew’s private school tuition… instead of just outright paying it… set up a scholarship fund and have a bunch of kids, including Thomas’s nephew, apply for a full scholarship and then award the scholarship to the nephew. I think you’d even get a tax write off that way.
Costs a little more in accounting fees, but I bet the tax benefits would more than cover the accounting fees.
Yeah, but then you have to pay for other kids, and some of them might be minorities or not have powerful parents.
This isn’t a charity, it’s just a targeted gift to a person you don’t know for no particular reason.
Where is the hand puppet emoji when you need it.
Not necessarily. Just award one scholarship.
I think some of these people are at a level of wealth where spending X to give the right government employee a bribe of (1/2)X might still be considered money well spent.
If you donated money to the softball team that could well also benefit kids other than the kid of the person you’re trying to bribe. It would benefit their kid’s friends too. Which isn’t necessarily bad.
And with the charitable stuff you have to look at the tax considerations.
Even if you end up having to, say, award two $100,000 scholarships instead of one for some legal reason… you spend $5,000 in accounting & admin fees to set up the fund, donate $200,000 to the scholarship fund, saving you 37% federal and 13.3% state so you’re out ($200,000 + $5,000) * (1 - .37 - .133) = $101,885 and Thomas is ahead $100,000 and Thomas’s nephew’s best friend’s family is ahead $100,000.
$1,885 is the cost of doing business. 
And of course the nephew’s best friend’s family is so grateful to the Thomas’s for making them aware of this scholarship and helping with the application that they, too, send appreciations to the Thomas’s…
Whether it is legal or not is not the question that should be asked. The question that needs to be asked is “is it ethical” and if not should the judge be derobbed or whatever they call it.
I’d say robbed of the bribe, then disrobed 
I would not call the activities I described as “ethical”, no.
I was just responding to the question of whether there are legal bribes or not. And yes, there are absolutely ways to bribe people that are not currently explicitly illegal, but that should be considered unethical.
The point is there needs to be discipline for judges, even if it doesn’t cross a legal line. And it needs to be codified in an ethics standard that has real teeth. A start would be applying the current standard that applies to every Federal judge not on the SC to the SC. Then followup it up by increasing those standards and adding the independent review board that Rastiln mentioned earlier.
Exactly… another example of being creative. Again, I’m not sure if that’s explicitly illegal or not. But I have zero doubt it was meant to influence Thomas. Conceivably it was merely meant to influence his decision to stay on the bench rather than quit & cash in at a lucrative post-SCOTUS gig. Possibly something much more sinister.
Sure.
Are you… thinking that I’m saying the bribes are ok? I’m not.
You seem to be saying what they are doing is not bribes because they are finding creative ways to make them legal even if the smell like wet garbage that’s been lit on fire. And therefore they are just okie dokey,nothing we can do about it.
This sounds like a great pitch for a huge tax on wealth.
IFYP
Nnnnnnnnnooooooooooooooooooooo… definitely not.
I think it is hard to do something about it, sure. Maybe nothing we can do about past bribes if they were within the technical bounds of the law. We can certainly try to prevent similar future bribes.
This seems eminently reasonable.
Even if they play by the rules, SC justice’s can make a lot of extra money on top of their salaries:
How much was the salary that Thomas couldn’t survive on?
Thomas had the classic problem of having come from a poor upbringing, and then he went on to interact with people in his professional career who have a lot of wealth.
So his spending just didn’t line up with the company he was keeping (hence his debts).
For a guy like him, that probably irked him because he was smarter than they were and he probably felt he made a greater effort in life.
The more I read about this guy the more convinced I am that he is corrupt. All the red flags are there when it comes to money.
I don’t think he said he couldn’t survive on it. I think he said he might leave for better paying work if it wasn’t increased.
The strange quirk about SC Justices is that their public sector pensions tend to be useless for them, given that most of them die on the job. Or maybe they have a spouse rider (usually 1/3rd of the amount). I don’t think I have seen granular data regarding their pensions.
Also, do their spouses get a life insurance payout when the SC justice dies? (given that they die at work).