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The New Yorker – 1785, when Benjamin Franklin, then the U.S. Ambassador to France, was set to return home, King Louis XVI presented him with a snuffbox decorated with a diamond-encrusted painting of the king. While gift-giving of this sort was common in European diplomacy, the expensive present caused a minor scandal in America. One of the corrupting practices that the founders were trying to prevent from taking root was the European habit of subtly buying off foreigners with gifts. Franklin, who fell in love with France during his service there, was viewed by some of his American colleagues as an easy mark.
Four years later, at the Constitutional Convention, Franklin’s snuffbox scandal was recalled when the framers drafted what came to be called the Emoluments Clause, an ironclad prohibition against receiving gifts: “No Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
Zephyr Teachout, whose book “Corruption in America,” from 2014, tells the history of Franklin’s snuffbox, said that, far from being an obscure provision, the gift ban was part of “the animating spirit of the Constitutional Convention,” along with other core American legal concepts such as federalism and separation of powers. “It goes to the heart of the fears at the Convention,” Teachout, a law professor at Fordham University who also ran a primary challenge to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, in 2014, said. “The framers were worried about foreign powers because they were so strong and we were so weak. They were worried about corruption overwhelming the new republic. The question was how do we protect against it?”
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