Corruption trial prosecutor wrong: Power is for sale to highest bidder

By David McElroy · March 1, 2012

“These defendants are guilty,” federal prosecutor Kendall Day told jurors in Montgomery, Ala., Wednesday morning. “It’s time for you to tell these defendants that the government in Alabama is not for sale.”

Federal prosecutors have been on a righteous crusade in Alabama for the last year or so. They arrested about a dozen people who were either politicians or involved in the gambling industry in the state and charged them with bribery. It was all about good government and keeping crooks out of the public’s business, they said. Unfortunately, the story is a lot more complicated than prosecutors want us to believe.

What’s the difference between a campaign contribution and a bribe? What’s the difference between giving someone money to get elected in exchange for supporting a certain position — which is illegal — and delivering a block of votes to a candidate in exchange for supporting a certain position — which is legal? If a union leader says, “If you support this law that we want, my 10,000 members will vote for you,” why is that legal — if it’s illegal to say, “If you support this law that we want, I will give your campaign a million dollars to help you get elected”?

The guy in the picture above is Milton McGregor. He’s been the leading figure in the gambling industry in Alabama for decades. He’s owned greyhound racing tracks and huge bingo operations. Because most gambling is illegal in Alabama — for reasons that have never been clear to me — he has had to fight hard for the right to be left alone by the government to run his businesses.

I don’t mean to paint him as a saint or a do-gooder. He’s not. He’s a hard-nosed businessman who’s willing to cut corners and bend the rules to get what he wants. He’s been known to make illegal cash contributions to candidates, but that’s never been legally proven. Two years ago, the state government was trying hard to shut down his bingo operations. The governor at the time was making it a big deal. He had a task force that he was using to raid many of the operations and claim they were illegal. (For complicated reasons that I won’t bore you with, the bingo operations were operating in a gray area of the law. The governor was interpreting the law one way. The operators interpreted it another way.)

Because their businesses were threatened, McGregor and other gambling industry types started spreading campaign contributions around to key legislators. They were trying to get the Legislature to pass a measure that would have allowed a statewide vote to definitively legalize the bingo operations. So they spent a lot of time, money and lobbying effort to woo legislators — to get them to support the statewide vote.

Federal prosecutors got the co-operation of anti-gambling legislators and got extensive recordings of meetings and phone calls between legislators and gambling industry representatives. There was plenty of discussion of money for campaigns, but in all of those recordings, there’s never one case in which a legislator agreed to vote a certain way in exchange for the money. Still, the feds arrested a dozen political and industry leaders anyway.

In the first trial last year, some of the defendants were found not guilty and some of the remaining ones were found not guilty on some of the charges. It was a disaster for the prosecution, but the government decided to go ahead and re-try the remaining charges.

The trial hasn’t gone well for the government, because prosecutors weren’t able to produce a single direct link between the money and votes. In some cases, the legislators who received the money even voted against the gambling industry on certain votes.

The prosecutor said that the jury should send the message that government is not for sale, but it clearly is. If government weren’t for sale, interest groups wouldn’t spend untold millions (billions?) of dollars each year buying influence with legislators. Companies who are scared of being regulated out of existence — such as the state gambling industry here — wouldn’t spend their money trying to get laws passed to protect themselves. Various special interests wouldn’t bother making millions and millions of dollars in campaign contributions.

If people make campaign contributions, isn’t it because they want people elected who will advance their interests? Why is that not bribery if it’s bribery for the gambling industry to try to elect or re-elect people favorable to its positions?

As long as you have a system that gives a coercive state the power to rule over others — businesses, industries, social groups, etc. — you’re going to have a situation in which the group which can bid the highest will win. Those bids will be a combination of campaign contributions and votes, but that doesn’t really matter, because if you have the money, you can translate that into votes.

Everything I know about the people who operate the gambling industry tells me that it’s a sleazy business and that it’s run by sleazy people. But if people want to voluntarily gamble their money away, it’s not anybody else’s business to stop them. It’s a voluntary arrangement. (It’s a tax on people who can’t do math.) So when government tries to criminalize private business arrangements, it creates criminals when individuals fight back for their right to conduct their own affairs without government interference.

I don’t want to cast McGregor and others of the gambling industry here as libertarian heroes. They’re not. They’re just self-interested businessmen pursuing ways to make more money. When you try to criminalize actions which should be perfectly personal and legal, you’re going to create criminals. That’s what the government is trying to do.

What’s more, they can’t even show that there was anything illegal done here. The gambling interests tried to influence legislation. So what? The same thing is done by churches, civil rights groups, business interests, utilities, labor unions and on and on and on.

Government is for sale anywhere a coercive government has power. If these guys are convicted, then everybody who tries to influence any legislation is just as guilty.

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