The Roberts Court Just Endorsed Many Of Nixon’s Most Corrupt Campaign Finance Schemes

[boston bean]

Mention the word “Nixonian,” and many people’s mind immediately go to Watergate, the break-in scandal and subsequent cover-up that eventually forced President Richard Nixon to resign. Watergate, however, was only one strand of a web of access-buying scandals, pay-to-play deals between the White House and major industries, and, in at least one instance, an effort to sell an ambassadorship for $100,000 in campaign donations.

And yet, according to an opinion Chief Justice John Roberts handed down last week, most of the Nixon Administration’s shadiest efforts to raise campaign funds do not qualify as “corruption.”

In 1974, a Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities chaired by Sen. Sam Ervin (D-NC) revealed activities that nearly anyone other than the five justices who signed on to Roberts’ decision in McCutcheon v. FEC would unreservedly describe as corruption. In the early 1970s, for example, the dairy industry desired increased price supports from the federal government, but Secretary of Agriculture Clifford Hardin has decided not to give these price supports to the milk producers. In response, various dairy industry organizations pledged $2 million to Nixon’s reelection campaign — and then developed a complicated scheme to launder the money through various small donations to “hundreds of committees in various states which could then hold the money for the President’s reelection campaign, so as to permit the producers to meet independent reporting requirements without disclosure.”

President Nixon later agreed to a meeting with industry representatives, and he decided to overrule his Agriculture Secretary. The milk producers got their price supports.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/04/07/3423462/if-chief-justice-roberts-had-been-around-in-the-1970s-he-would-have-endorsed-nixonian-corruption/

[Downwinder]

1. Back to the suitcases filled with money at airport checks?