But the chances that the mayor will quit his job are slim. To stick, the charges against him will have to cross the high bar for official misconduct that the Supreme Court set in McDonnell v. United States (2016). In that case, the Court unanimously vacated former Virginia governor Robert McDonnell’s honest-services-fraud and extortion convictions on the grounds that the alleged quid pro quo did not constitute an “official act.” Now, to sustain a bribery charge against a politician, prosecutors must link specific gifts to “a formal exercise of government power”—a daunting task. Consider the fact that multiple donors to former mayor Bill de Blasio’s campaigns went to prison for bribery, yet de Blasio himself avoided prosecution. It’s just not that easy to convict an elected official for taking bribes.

And Hoylman-Sigal is wrong: it’s not “untenable” for an indicted mayor to continue to serve. American municipal history is filled with scandal-plagued mayors who bore their federal indictments as a badge of honor, refusing to step down until they were convicted. Sharpe James of Newark, Kwame Kilpatrick of Detroit, and Marion Barry of Washington, D.C. each resisted demands that they resign after their indictments; Barry was even reelected mayor after his conviction and prison stint. While Providence mayor Buddy Cianci resigned in 1984 after pleading no contest to assault, he was reelected in 1990, 1994, and 1998. When Cianci was federally indicted in 2001 on 27 charges, including extortion, witness tampering, racketeering, and mail fraud, however, he didn’t resign until his conviction the following year.