Flipping their wigs: the framers would be shocked at how far conservative jurists have narrowed the definition of what constitutes political corruption.

• Author: Bush, Daniel
• Position: Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin's Snuff Box to Citizens United - Book review

Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin's Snuff Box to Citizens United

by Zephyr Teachout

Harvard University Press, 376 pp.

When New York Governor Andrew Cuomo won his Democratic primary last fall, he praised his upstart opponent, Zephyr Teachout, for running a "spirited campaign" and "engaging in the democratic process." That was certainly an understatement. Though she had once played a key role in Howard Dean's presidential bid as a very young activist, she'd never run for public office herself and had been living the life of a Fordham law professor when she decided to challenge Cuomo. Teachout spent less than $300,000 on her campaign, compared to Cuomo's $19 million, yet she still took 34 percent of the vote in a race with one of the most powerful and ambitious crown princes of the Democratic Party.

One lesson of that performance may be that other big-name politicians should also look out for unexpectedly potent insurgent challengers from within their own party. Democrats rooting for someone to take on Hillary Clinton from the left certainly took heart from Teachout's performance. But another important lesson focuses on Teachout's individual virtues and talents, which make her someone very much worth watching in national politics. Though a generation younger than Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, Teachout shares the profile of being both a crusading reformer by temperament and also an academic who has set down her ideas about politics and government with intellectual vigor.

The key to Teachout's political philosophy is expressed in her recently published book, Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin's Snuff Box to Citizens United, which she started working on long before she decided to run for governor, and which was still in press at the time of the primary election. She wrote the book, she says, primarily in answer to conservative members of the Supreme Court, who, in a series of decisions climaxing in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, have successively narrowed the legal definition of corruption to the point that it now effectively includes only outright bribery. In Citizens United, for example, the majority struck down corporate spending limits in politics on the grounds that there is nothing inherently corrupting about corporations trying to buy influence with politicians so long as there is no explicit quid pro quo.

Teachout spends much of her book showing just how naive, dangerous, and...