Court Opinion

ID: 9421788
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:59:52.002616+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:32.423844
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Douglas,
concurring.
The argument that § 214 requires the payment of money or other thing of value be made to the person who is to use his influence “to procure” an “appointive office” is not frivolous. The legislative history shpws that that was one of the evils against which Congress acted. But I am also convinced that Congress moved against the other evil as well — payment to a political party for the use of “influence to procure any appointive office.” The abuse in appointing postmasters during the Coolidge administration was the occasion for the law; and then as now (if the allegations in the information are to be *263believed) payments for those offices sometimos went to the party, sometimes to a politician. As Congressman Stevenson, who later'introduced the measure in the House, said in answering a question as to who gets the money paid for “the appointive office”:
“Either it goes into his pocket and the pockets of his machine or it goes into the coffers of the Republican Party. If it does, it is the most blatant defiance of the civil service law that any party has ever had the hardihood to put over, and it is as disgraceful as the Teapot Dome proposition any day.” 65 Cong. Rec. 1410.
The words used in § 214 are broad enough to include both evils. ‘
I have sometimes felt, as my dissents show (see United States v. Classic, 313 U. S. 299, 331; Rosenberg v. United States, 346 U. S. 273, 310; United States v. A & P Trucking Co., 358 U. S. 121, 127), that the Court has not always' construed a criminal'statute so as to resolve doubts in favor of the citizen. But that principle — as highly preferred as any in a government of laws — does no service here. To.hold the conduct charged in this, information outside the Act is to find ambiguities and doubts not obvious on -the face of the legislation, nor justifiably imputed from the legislative history. The inclusion in the original version of § 215 of limiting words can indicate no more, than that Congress intended a narrower scope for that section than for § 214. It does not show that § 214 was to be similarly narrowed.
Accordingly I join the opinion of the Court.