Trump has now repeatedly offered his voters $5,000 checks if Republicans hold onto the House and Senate this fall, calling it the “Trump dividend.” On Sunday he told a rally that it’ll “happen 100 percent” if enough people turn out to vote GOP.
Since his own party controls both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, he could now get an appropriation passed for the ~$1.2 trillion this will add to the national debt; the fact that he’s not doing this is pretty much proof that what’s really going on here is a good old fashioned vote-buying scheme dressed up with some fancy language to make it seem less like the crime it is.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that “if the Republicans win” is quite simply a way of telling millions of Americans that there’s five grand riding on how they vote.
And then there’s Trump telling a crowd in North Carolina that he’s not going to send any more disaster aid via FEMA unless they elect a Republican senator. He claims it was a joke, like when he joked about tearing down the East Wing, or building a triumphal arch, or trying to end mail-in voting.
It’s really just a variation on the $5,000 check: “Vote the way I want, and I’ll make sure you get something; vote against me, and I’ll withhold benefits from you.”
Americans have seen this corrupt movie before, and the last time we saw it we made it a crime.
During the 1938 midterm elections in the midst of the Republican Great Depression, about a quarter of all American families were surviving on paychecks from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a program Republicans decried as “communism.” Democrats, though, controlled both branches of Congress and the White House, and more than a few of the local Democratic politicians were willing to exploit that widespread dependence on the public dole.
Reporter Thomas Stokes documented how WPA workers were being leaned on for both votes and campaign contributions; the reporting earned him a Pulitzer. TIME magazine reported that Harry Hopkins, the guy heading up the WPA, was promising both jobs and promotions in exchange for votes, and a Texas Democratic senator investigated, finding similar reports out of Kentucky, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.
The scandal ripped across the front pages from coast to coast, and people were rightly disgusted. Given that a quarter of the population were only able to survive because of WPA payments, the threat to pull them (or expand them) in exchange for votes and contributions seemed like extortion.
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So the president’s own party decided to clean up its own act. New Mexico’s Democratic Senator Carl Hatch wrote a bill he titled “An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities” that explicitly outlawed government officials from using the power of their offices to influence politics or elections. A Democratic House passed it 241 to 134 and FDR signed it into law on August 2, 1939. We call it the Hatch Act.
Section 3 of the 1939 Hatch Act contained a criminal statute that’s still on the books, only lightly amended, as Title 18, Section 600 of the U.S. Code. It doesn’t begin with “any federal employee,” it opens with “Whoever”:
“Whoever, directly or indirectly, promises
anyemployment, position, compensation, contract, appointment, or other benefit, provided for or made possible in whole or in part byanyAct of Congress … toanyperson as consideration, favor, or reward foranypolitical activity or for the support of or opposition toanycandidate oranypolitical party in connection withanygeneral or special election toanypolitical office … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.” (emphasis added)
A companion law, Section 597, makes it a two-year felony to offer any sort of expenditure to influence anybody’s vote; former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner argues Trump crossed that line the moment he made that promise. And, he points out, “if the Republicans win, you win with us” is a clear, neat description of offering a reward for supporting a political party in a general election.
Fox “News” and Trump’s other lickspittles argue that in 1982 the Supreme Court, in * Brown v. Hartlage*, already said that politicians can make campaign promises involving money because in that case a Kentucky candidate had promised that, if elected, he’d cut his own salary.
But that guy was describing what he’d do to himself if he won the office he was seeking; there’s never before in American history been an offer of cash to voters with a trigger clause that says the money only comes if one party wins and the other loses.
That’s why Republican Thomas Massie said he’s insulted at Trump suggesting his and his constituents’ votes could be bought for a mere $5k, why former GOP Congressman Bob Good called it a “vote-buying scheme,” and why the libertarians at Reason magazine used the word “brazen” to describe Trump’s latest corrupt scheme.
As I mentioned here yesterday, 89 percent of Americans now believe that our government is experiencing “widespread corruption” because for over fifty years Democrats have let Republicans get away with their crimes, including Carter endorsing Ford’s pardon, Clinton’s “look to the future,” Gore’s concession, and Garland’s fifteen-month nap. Every one of those choices by Democrats told the next sleazy Republican that there was basically no price to be paid for corrupting our democracy.
This $5,000 vote-buying scheme and Trump’s FEMA threats are the perfect pivot points for Democrats to highlight how insanely corrupt the GOP has become since Nixon first started taking bribes and selling legislation.
And while Trump has the immunity that six on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court gave him, the people around him who are echoing and promoting these illegal schemes don’t.
Both Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Vice President JD Vance have been out hustling this $5,000 scheme on television, and Section 600 makes it a crime for anyone who makes such a campaign promise “directly or indirectly.”
And the federal statute of limitations is five years, which carries this particular offense out to September of 2031 when it’s reasonable to hope/assume Democrats will again control our federal government and its ability to prosecute crimes.
So, Democrats in Congress need to get ready with subpoenas and serious questions: Who drafted this crazy plan? Who at Treasury and Commerce worked on it, and was it during their government-paid work hours? Did the RNC coordinate any aspect of this? And what the hell is going on with FEMA?
Those are the questions the Hatch Act was written to let us ask.
There are also anti-vote-buying laws on the books in every one of the 50 states and DC, and each state has its own ability to launch investigations, empanel grand juries, and go after corrupt officials. Democratic state attorneys general could, at the very least, begin notifying corrupt Republicans to preserve their records and documents, putting everybody on notice that finally, after all these years of GOP corruption, clean and accountable government is on its way.
Democrats cleaned up their own vote-buying corruption in the late 1930s, and now it looks like they’re going to have to clean up this Republican scheme along the same lines. Let your elected officials know you want Hatch Act and FEMA investigations started on Day One of the new Congress in January.
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