Wealth & Money Quote by Stephen Breyer

Breyer’s line is doing something judges rarely do in public: admitting that corruption doesn’t always arrive as a brown envelope. It arrives as a mood. “Once you get into this campaign business” is a deliberately deflating phrase, casting elections not as civic ritual but as an industry with its own gravity. The moment “a lot of money” becomes normal, the ethical question shifts from whether a judge can be bought to whether a judge can remain psychologically untouched by the act of being financed.

The key move is the hypothetical running in the judge’s head: “what’s going to happen if I decide the case this way or that way?” Breyer isn’t describing a villain rubbing his hands; he’s describing the everyday anticipatory anxiety of a public figure who knows that rulings have consequences beyond doctrine. Money changes the consequences. Not necessarily because donors demand a result, but because the judge begins to imagine retaliation, primary challenges, attack ads, or the drying up of support. The bench starts to feel like a stage with a scoreboard.

Context matters: Breyer has long been identified with institutionalism and pragmatic restraint. His warning is less a partisan jab than a systems critique aimed at judicial elections and the post-Citizens United reality of super PACs and dark money. The subtext is procedural legitimacy. Courts don’t have an army; they have credibility. If judges are seen as calibrating outcomes to political fallout, even unconsciously, the judiciary stops being a countermajoritarian check and starts looking like another branch of campaign messaging. Breyer’s intent is to make that slippery transformation feel immediate, almost inevitable, unless the rules change.