A legal scholar traces American law's definition of political corruption from the Constitutional Convention — where delegates like George Mason worried openly that foreign gifts and personal favors to officeholders would corrode the republic — through two centuries of statutes and court decisions.
Her key argument is that the founders held a broad, structural conception of corruption: any use of public power for private gain was suspect, whether or not money changed hands in a provable exchange. That conception is why the Constitution's emoluments clauses exist at all — a specific worry about gifts from foreign states.
Modern jurisprudence, she shows, has narrowed corruption almost to the point of a criminal-law technicality: courts increasingly require proof of an explicit quid pro quo, a literal this-for-that bargain, before anything counts as corrupt. Citizens United is the culmination of that narrowing.
The gap between the founders' broad worry and the courts' narrow test is, in effect, the license this tracker's subjects operate under: conduct the framers would have called corrupt on its face is now, in many cases, simply legal.
If we do not provide against corruption, our government will soon be at an end.— George Mason, quoted in Corruption in America