This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 28th, 2016. I'm Caleb Brown.

The Supreme Court has thrown out the public corruption conviction of former Virginia Governor Bob

McDonnell. The Court was unanimous in throwing out the verdict

so what does this mean for similar cases? Kevin Ring is Vice President for Families

against Mandatory Minimums. He himself served time in prison on similar charges of so-called honest services fraud.

We spoke yesterday.

Yeah, the Supreme Court basically reeled in the honest services statute, which has been a catch-all

prosecutorial tool to go after public corruption.

Both in the federal level, Senator Menendez is being charged in New Jersey on this statute,

and at the state and local level.

So you've seen a lot of prosecutions of state and local officials and Governor McDonnell and his

wife were the latest high profile one.

Now this was a unanimous decision here, what can future cases take away from this?

Well the government's going to have to do more work before it goes after what it sees as

public corruption. No one wants to is public corruption.

No one wants to see public officials bought and sold.

They want to believe that the public servants acting in the public's interest.

But the government had a very liberal view of what public corruption entailed and had a very limited view of what

they had to prove to establish it.

So we were in a point in this country where, you know, people realize that a quid pro quo is

illegal bribery you know this for that but under Supreme Court precedent almost

anything is a quid I mean you know you give somebody a burger hamburger you take him to a ball game, anything was that.

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