Best article I've seen on emoluments clause linked below.

An excerpt:

The Constitution mentions emoluments in two other clauses. The compensation clause (Article II, Section 1, Clause 7) bars the president from receiving emoluments from a state or the federal government besides his presidential salary, and the incompatibility clause (Article I, Section 6, Clause 2) bars senators and representatives from taking any federal office whose emoluments have been increased during their current term in Congress, until the full term is over. In both clauses, the term has historically been understood to refer only to the salary and monetary benefits of the office itself. President Obama faced no compensation-clause challenges for collecting income from the federal government on more than half a million dollars’ worth of Treasury bonds he owned while president, since the income wasn’t connected to his job. And “benefits” has sometimes been construed narrowly: The Office of Legal Counsel approved President Reagan’s receipt of a pension from the State of California despite the compensation clause, and Hugo Black was allowed to leave his Senate seat in the middle of his term and sit on the Supreme Court after Congress had recently given retired justices a pension, despite the incompatibility clause. When Hillary Clinton was nominated for secretary of state in 2009, after Congress had increased the salaries of Cabinet officers during her term, Congress revoked the increase for Clinton’s office to avoid an incompatibility-clause problem.

These and other historical precedents are cited by University of Iowa law professor Andy Grewal, who argues that, in general, the term “emoluments” was long understood to refer to the compensation for holding a particular office or performing specific duties for a government, and not to every kind of revenue produced by commerce or investments. As Grewal notes, under the broad definition of emoluments used in the Brookings paper, the proposed 1810 amendment would have stripped the citizenship of any American innkeeper who rented a room to a passing diplomat, or any merchant who sold tobacco to foreign royalty, or even the author of a book if one copy was purchased by a foreign prince — a draconian sanction that would surely have raised some debate before it passed both houses of Congress. Under that test, Obama would have been impeachable if any foreign head of state had bought a copy of The Audacity of Hope, and Trump would be in violation if one of his hotels rented a room to an official from a foreign nation.


[Post edited by JMHoo at 06/12/2017 11:25AM]