If you read this, I'll give you $5000...maybe.
I went to law school because I wanted to understand how the law limits government power, and how it enables the people to hold government accountable. With the midterms coming, I'm posting a series on laws that feel relevant to current events and are related to the limits of government power.
Today's entry is 18 U.S.C. § 597. It criminalizes anyone who "makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person…to vote for or against any candidate."
Courts have generally read vote-buying laws like 18 U.S.C. § 597 to cover inducements to vote a certain way, whether or not the payment is guaranteed or contingent on an outcome.
I’d like to pose a totally made-up hypothetical for us to consider: a sitting president promises every adult citizen $5,000, but only if his party wins the House and Senate.
Does this violate the law?
Here's what's clever about the offer in the hypo: offering a dividend to every adult citizen if a party wins an election probably isn't a payment conditioned on how any individual votes. That's a real distinction under § 597, which targets expenditures made to induce a specific vote. So, if you sit in the Oval Office with a bunch of enabler lawyers trying to figure out how to circumvent the law, you land on a dividend structure and you probably don't trip the statute.
So, safe to say, an offer like the one in this extremely made-up hypothetical is probably technically legal. But it demonstrates something else too: there had to be a room full of lawyers whose job is to expand and test the limits of the president's power, not to check it, hunting for the version of "buy the election" that a court can't touch.
Technical legalities aside, I'll let you decide whether the facts of this very made-up hypothetical feel like they're designed to uphold the rule of law, justice, and fairness or to route around them? And would tactics like that reflect the judgment you'd want from a party and a president running the country.