Right-wing legal interests funded by the megawealthy are routinely feting lower-court judges and treating them to all-expenses-paid trips, which effectively function as a reward system for judges who espouse and maintain hard-line conservative legal views.
Genuinely how is this not considered illegal in the US?
If you tried this in most parts of Europe you’d be charged for committing bribery
The Supreme Court of the United States has decided that corporations are people and money is free speech.
We have become what Benjamin Franklin feared we would become. He could see the future:
The founders feared political factions forming above all and basically designed the government around not allowing factions to take absolute power, like separating the presidential office from the executive branch etc. and not even making the position clear. Presidents have basically pushed on the limits and defined the office over the years and political factions formed around economic interests of the people because of course they would. At first you basically needed a minimum amount of worked land to even vote in most states, men’s suffrage happened long before women’s. America was basically designed as a free real estate project and sort of still is.
Pretty sure the founders kind of assumed we’d have a couple of revolutions by now
See that’s interesting. Franklin’s talking about society getting fucked up and naturally spawning a bad government above itself as a necessary part of its own structure.
It’s not just that people get corrupt and form a despotic government, it’s that the world getting fucked up means despots are more likely to be liked and desired by people seeking safety from the corruption around them.
It’s illegal.
Enforceable is the issue here because the people being bribed are the same ones that would ultimately decide any criminal appeals and they, themselves, have no accountability or oversight.