Supreme Court hears dispute over scope of federal gratuity statute §666 in Snyder v. United States

At oral argument in Snyder v. United States, counsel for the petitioner argued that 18 U.S.C. §666 cannot be read to make ordinary after‑the‑fact gifts criminal because the statute would otherwise sweep in untold millions of state, local and private grantees and subject them to up to 10 years in prison.

The petitioner's counsel, identified in the transcript as Miss Blatt, told the justices that "Section 666 applies to 19,000,000 state, local, and tribal officials and anyone else whose employer receives federal benefits, including 14,000,000 Medicare funded health care workers," and warned that the government's broader reading would be "stunningly vague" and raise serious federalism and due‑process problems. "It would be downright Kafkaesque to subject state and local officials to a standardless and severe regime where federal interests are at their weakest," counsel said.

Why the case matters: §666 criminalizes corruptly receiving "anything of value" intending to be "influenced or rewarded," and the Court must decide whether "rewarded" covers gratuitous, after‑the‑fact payments absent a prior quid pro quo and, if so,…