CHAPTER THREE PATRONAGE CRIMES HISTORICAL BACKGROUND Federal jurisdiction over patronage crimes is usually attained by virtue of the federal funds involved in a government job or benefit that is used to induce or reward partisan activity by government employees. Over the past century, Congress has enacted, at roughly fifty-year intervals, three landmark pieces of legislation in this area. Until the Hatch Act reform amendments of 1993, most federal laws dealing with patronage abuses of government personnel and programs derived from either the 1883 Pendleton Civil Service Act or the 1939 Hatch Act. The Pendleton Act aimed at dismantling the partisan “spoils system” that existed in the executive branch of the federal government at the time; it created a merit civil service, and enacted the Civil Service Commission to ensure non-partisan federal employment. The Act also contained four criminal provisions designed to protect federal employees against political manipulation. These provisions, now codified at 18 U.S.C. §§ 602, 603, 606, and 607, prohibit political shakedowns of federal employees, political activity in federal workspace, and politically motivated threats and reprisals against federal employees. In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt promulgated an executive order, known as Civil Service Rule No. 1, that prohibited most active campaigning and electioneering by merit civil servants. Over the next thirty years, the Civil Service Commission decided approximately 2,000 administrative cases involving alleged violations of this executive order, and in the process defined the scope of permissible political activities. In 1939, the Hatch Act codified this ban on active partisan campaigning by executive branch employees, and incorporated those 99