Silver Threads and Golden Needles
By 
By far the biggest loophole in the outside compensation limits for Supreme Court justices — other than the whole “just ignore them altogether” strategery followed by Clarence Thomas and his plutocrat friends — is provided by book advances.
Amy Coney Barrett is publishing what I more than suspect will be an anodyne collection of soporific bromides about how judges should interpret the law rather than make it, along with a cutesy anecdote or three.
Sentinel, a “conservative imprint” of Penguin Random House (true story: there are only five big commercial publishers left in a country of 340 million people/23,321 readers) offered a petit cadeau of two million dollars US to convince her to cast these pearls before the nation, which means the publisher would probably have to sell around 700,000 copies of said tome just to break even.
I’d say the odds of that happening are extremely long at best, but I also more than suspect that these sorts of advances aren’t motivated by normal book publishing logic. What’s going on here, probably, is that the Overlords in the Chain of Ownership think it in their best interest to spread a little sugar around in order to make sure they have some friends in high places. Speaking of the Great Chain of Corporate Being, Penguin Random House, which was two different publishers until 2013, is in turn owned by:
Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA, commonly known as Bertelsmann (German pronunciation: [ˈbɛʁtl̩sˌman] ⓘ), is a German private multinational conglomerate corporation based in Gütersloh, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is one of the world’s largest media conglomerates and is also active in the service sector and education.[
I’m not suggesting anything as crude as an explicit quid pro quo here of course. Heaven forfend!
Rather this is more along the lines of when Purdue Pharmaceutical flys doctors to conferences in fancy locations, with ice sculptures and sea urchin ceviche tapas, and maybe a performance from Sting or somebody like that (He has to feed his family after all).
It’s not as if the Sacklers via their corporate manifestation are bribing anybody in the legal sense. That is not a nice word. And I don’t for a second doubt that ACB would be shocked to the core of her being by the suggestion that her opinion(s) is being bought via — again, perfectly legal — emoluments.
That’s the great thing about being a person of spotless integrity: I can take what to the cynical looks like a flat-out bribe, while being certain that no such thing is happening, because I never was that kind, as Linda Ronstadt once put it.