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Page Number: 18

14 

SNYDER v. UNITED STATES 

Opinion of the Court 

the  extensive  federal  gratuities  guidance  given  to  federal
workers.  The Office of Government Ethics has promulgated
comprehensive  and  detailed 
regulatory  guidelines
specifying what gifts are allowed and prohibited for federal 
workers.  For  instance,  the  guidelines  for  federal  officials 
set forth cost thresholds, exempt certain gifts from friends
or  family,  clarify  what  discounts  are  acceptable,  and 
explain which social invitations an official may accept—all
with multiple examples to guide federal officials’ conduct.
See 5 CFR §2635.204.

Nothing for state and local officials.  It is unfathomable 
that Congress would authorize a 10-year criminal sentence 
for gifts to 19 million state and local officials without any 
coherent  federal  guidance  (or  any  federal  guidance  at  all) 
about  how  an  official  can  distinguish  the  innocuous  from 
the criminal. 

When construing a statute like this that regulates state
and local officials, this Court’s precedents caution against 
leaving  the  statute’s  “outer  boundaries  ambiguous”  and 
involving the “Federal Government in setting standards of 
good government for local and state officials.”  McDonnell, 
579 U. S., at 577 (quotation marks omitted).  And the Court 
has  emphasized  that  a  “statute  in  this  field  that  can 
linguistically  be  interpreted  to  be  either  a  meat  axe  or  a
scalpel should reasonably be taken to be the latter.”  Sun-
Diamond, 526 U. S., at 412.  So it is here. 

B 

Faced  with  that  phalanx  of  difficulties  with 

its 
interpretation  of  §666,  the  Government  offers  little.  The 
Government’s  argument  boils  down  to  one  main  point—
that §666 uses the term “rewarded” as well as “influenced.” 
And that, too, is the dissent’s main point.  The Government 
(echoed by the dissent) says that Congress would not have 
added  the  term  “rewarded”  to  “influenced”  in  §666  if  the 
statute  were  meant  to  cover  only  bribes  and  not  also