Systematic Corruption and Elite Accountability

The US has a huge problem with elite accountability. It corrodes trust in institutions and convinces people that nothing will matter, weakening a basic belief that democracy depends upon. A poll before Trump’s verdict showed that a majority of people thought Trump was guilty after the closing arguments, but that less than a majority thought he would be convicted. That discrepancy is not healthy for a body politic. But it is also understandable, as three stories form this week showed.

First, we have an article about how Congresspeople, more than 300 of them, were reimbursed for 5.2 million dollars’ worth of travel expenses that did not require them to provide a receipt. The program that allows this is new receipts free reimbursement is new, and, of course, ripe for abuse:

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), the program’s overall top spender, was reimbursed for nearly $30,000 in lodging expenses and more than $10,000 for food in 2023. He was reimbursed for more than $4,000 for lodging in two different months and more than $3,000 in five different months.

A spokesperson for Gaetz said he was reimbursed for lodging expenses on days when the House was out of session but Gaetz remained in Washington on official business for depositions related to his post on the select committee on weaponization of the federal government.

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Other members of the weaponization committee expensed significantly less than Gaetz.

This is a small example, but it does demonstrate how easy it is for people in power to abuse the system.

A more troubling example is the all expenses paid retreat that a Federal judge who tossed the mask mandate on very novel grounds took. The retreat was run by an organization that taught the Judge how to apply a novel legal method — one she had never used before — to get their desired outcome on the case in question. The retreat was held at an expensive, exclusive ski-resort, unlikely to be affordable on a judge’s salary. And they have held other retreats for other judges. This is clearly a kind of bribe — use our methods to get our preferred results and you can continue to get free trips to very nice places.

And of source, Trump himself out and out demanded a bribe from various oil producing companies recently:

Donald Trump’s brazen pitch to 20 fossil-fuel heads for $1bn to aid his presidential campaign in return for promises of lucrative tax and regulatory favors is the “definition of corruption”, a top Democrat investigating the issue has said.

And yet this story has largely disappeared from the news. No one, it seems, expects Trump to be held accountable for his actions. Nor do they expect a judge to not take freebies form people with interest in how they rule in cases. Nor do they expect lawmakers to prove they deserve to be reimbursed. Part of the issue is that the right wing of the Supreme Court has made bribery almost impossible to prove as a crime. If you don’t have a notarized from stating that you paid a candidate for their vote, the Roberts and his companions don’t think it is bribery.

This kind of systematic contempt for ethics, appearances, and common-sense behavior kills democracies. Once people become convinced that their elites are above the law, the concept of both the law and of working to improve society together — i.e. democracy — becomes a joke. And authoritarians and others can use that sense of hopelessness to further erode freedoms and democratic accountability.

Systems produce what they are designed to produce. And right now, ours is producing corruption and the appearance of corruption. The single most important thing we can do to protect our democracy is to make our elites once again afraid of even the appearance of corruption. Absent that, democracy is just going to look like another mugs’ game.