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“There’s no senator I can think of who’s done more sleuthing to figure out the money trail in American politics, particularly as it affects the courts.” —Jane Mayer, author of the national bestseller Dark Money
I LOVE THE LAW. I ACTUALLY REVERE THE law. As a boy, I wanted to be Atticus Finch. I loved Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons schooling his acolyte: “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide … the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down … do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?”1 So it’s not an easy thing for me to call out our U.S. Supreme Court, which many have viewed as standing apart from politics. But to me, the evidence is compelling, and I fear that until someone points out that the emperor has no clothes, the emperor’s naked parade is likely to go on. Sadly, one of the consequences of this era of extreme partisan politics is that many people will not heed my warning about what is happening in our courts, especially in the Supreme Court, simply because of who I am: a sitting U.S. senator and a Democrat. I get it. But if you were to walk away from this book thinking I’ve simply set out my list of political grievances with recent Court rulings, I have not done my job. I am not alone in my concerns. Court watchers from the right and left report that the Supreme Court today is polarized “in a fashion we have never seen.”2 Veteran New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse, who for years had rejected efforts to attach political labels to Supreme Court justices, finally admitted that it is “impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Republican-appointed majority is committed to harnessing the Supreme Court to an ideological agenda.”3 Norm Ornstein, of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, has called out the “tribal” politicized Court to the point of calling for term limits for the justices.4 After Justice Alito’s draft abortion ruling overturning Roe was leaked in May 2022, the condemnation language grew even hotter. “The conservative majority’s radicalism will deepen the crisis of American democracy,” said E.J. Dionne. Jennifer Rubin said a “partisan, radical majority” had “burst through the bounds of judicial restraint” in a “play for theocratic supremacy.” Under the headline “The Supreme Court’s Legitimacy Is Already Lost,” Dahlia Lithwick called it “one of the most brazenly political acts to ever come out of the court,” showing “staggering lack of regard for its own legitimacy”; that “there are simply no rules left at an institution that is supposed to be the one making the rules.” Charles Blow warned: “The robes can go rogue. This is the power Republicans want—the power to overrule the will of the majority.” The Star-Ledger described the Court as “irretrievably broken,” thanks to “political capture … driven by the dark-monied interests of the Judicial Crisis Network.”5 Recently, two members of President Biden’s Supreme Court Commission, retired federal judge Nancy Gertner and Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, published a disquieting op-ed headlined “The Supreme Court Isn’t Well.”6 This title mirrored the sentence in my amicus brief that provoked Justice Alito’s ire and the right’s “faux outrage.” The “anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian direction of this court’s decisions,” they wrote, move our democracy “toward a system in which the few corruptly govern the many, something between autocracy and oligarchy.” They called out in particular “the dubious legitimacy of the way some justices were appointed.” Now we come to the last category of evidence: the payoff. We’ve seen the motive behind the Scheme, even the plan; we’ve seen the means the right-wing elite had to work with; and we’ve seen the front-group method by which the Scheme was accomplished. We’ve seen the gale-force political pressure in the Senate, and how vulnerable a victim the Court was. We’ve even seen actual “admissions against interest” by the Trump White House (that the Federalist Society was “insourced”) and by the Federalist Society (that it “came up with” the nominees). We’ve seen how Trump outsourced judicial selection to that private operation while it was anonymously funded by unelected, unaccountable big donors. We’ve also seen how corporate, libertarian, and socially conservative forces merged in the 1970s and ’80s to create the right-wing anti-government movement that slowly infiltrated and took over the Republican Party. And how money in politics—especially the tsunami of unlimited dark money unleashed by Citizens United—accelerated the takeover. We’ve seen the Federalist Society use its 501(c)(3) arm to indoctrinate, groom, and audition candidates, and its associated web of shadowy 501(c)(4) affiliates raise and spend hundreds of millions of dollars. We’ve seen how similar Court capture was to the “regulatory capture” researchers have been documenting for years in administrative agencies, and how inadequate the Court’s own rules are at guarding against outside influence. And we’ve seen the judicial confirmation process in the Senate go from meaningful review to partisan rubber stamp, leaving a wreckage of norms, rules, prerogatives, and FBI integrity in its wake. Now let’s look at the loot, the booty, the proceeds of the Scheme. In assessing guilt, the principle of looking at who benefits has ancient roots. Cicero, talking about the murderous conspirator Clodius, said, “for such an audacious, nefarious monster it is enough to show that he had a great reason,” and cited the proverb of Cassius “who profits?”—a phrase still alive today in Latin, “cui bono.” So who benefited from the Scheme? By the time Justice Barrett joined the Court on the eve of the 2020 election, the partisan parade of civil cases under Chief Justice Roberts that gave big wins to big-donor interests had grown to number more than eighty cases—more than the Supreme Court’s typical total annual output. For the big-money donors, it’s been a feast. In 2020 and 2021, I worked with my fellow Democrats in the Senate to produce a series of “Captured Courts” reports showing what was at stake: women’s right to choose and to access contraception; communities’ ability to fight dirty fossil fuel companies making their children sick; workers’ rights to come together to negotiate for better pay and working conditions; consumers’ ability to hold companies that defraud them accountable in a fair trial; parents’ ability to keep their children safe from guns; and all of our rights to enjoy the free and democratic society that our Founders created and left for future generations to perfect. These “Captured Courts” reports can be found online. They are scrupulously researched, and they make for sobering reading. Those reports had their roots in an article I wrote in 2019 about what was then a seventy-three-case run of partisan 5–4 decisions for the big donors from the Roberts Court.7 It had seemed to me that something was terribly wrong at the Court as these decisions piled up, but it wasn’t enough to intuit that. I needed to confirm this intuition. First, I needed to make the case to my Senate Democratic caucus. My initial suggestions to the caucus that something was seriously wrong at the Court had not gone well. My colleagues were still heavily invested in the instinctive tradition of protecting the Court’s reputation. I owe Senator Patrick Leahy my gratitude for being the first to stand up to support me. As the dean of our caucus, our Senate president pro tempore, a chairman of Judiciary, and the senior Democrat on Appropriations, he’s seen a few things. So when Patrick spoke, people listened. And when he said, “Sheldon’s right. We need to listen to him,” it had a big effect. Thank you, Patrick...
(If you missed my July 4th earlier post on this book, look to the right to check it out as well)
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This one book is the most comprehensive exploration of exactly what has occurred to bring about the present Supreme Court as it exists and acts today. We had already learned, if you are an ongoing watcher of world news, that at least two of the Justices have accepted outside money for gifts, travel, et.al., as well as becoming aware that these two individuals' wives actively acted on behalf of the republican party to display partisan preference... without the justice husbands recusing themselves to ensure no conflict of interest was allowed. Flaunting normal rules, they have most recently voted to give the former president total immunity, being made so loosely that just about anything would result in the past president being immuned for his known criminal acts in office, including insurrection...
“An alarming . . . account of efforts to install conservative judges on the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary. . . . Whitehouse gathers copious evidence and strikes a fiery tone.” —Publishers Weekly
“Chapter and verse on how the U.S. Supreme Court was ‘captured.’”—The Boston Globe
“A harrowing account of how right-wing billionaires and business interests have worked to capture the American judiciary—all the way up to the Supreme Court—to create an American plutocracy. Anyone who cares about the future of American democracy—indeed, the future of America, writ large—needs to read this book.” —Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science, Harvard University, and author ofMerchants of Doubt
Readers, I've taken the time to check some of the more recent videos available related to The Supreme Court. The last one, shown above, is very important. It is also two years old! My point is that I can recommend this book to you over and over and over. But if we do not vote to ensure that this type of corruption is not stopped immediately (like in November 2024) there really is no reason to continue to learn, read, and discover exactly what is happening in America. These are not lies... Many of the issues we have seen occur with our own lies; e.g., when the past president incited those of his followers to march to our capitol and commit treason/insurrection. We all saw it happening. And, if you didn't actually see it, there are many videos and books out there sharing personal experiences of what happened that day. As mentioned above, the wife of one of the justices was there!
This book is going to be tedious reading, I admit that. It is explained effectively, but still, it is...just...tedious. It is full of information that has led to the most recent mandate by the Supreme Court that says that the past president is immune for anything during his time in office... Delay after delay has been forced on Americans as slow (if any) justice is attempted. If you want more information, the Senator has videos on his YouTube channel... All I ask is that you understand what has happened and, hopefully, ensure by your votes that it stops before further damage occurs...
Kate Smith, in 1943 introduced a song that had been around even longer... I have been happily singing it through many celebrations of July 4th here in the United States.
But I awoke early this morning and found no joy in my heart or mind to sing... There have been many people who have talked about the danger of what the republican party and its backers have been planning for America and it sickens me to my stomach... Where and how and who are these people providing what is called "dark money" which is being used in so many different ways to break and destroy our American Democracy? Each jab leads me further into sorrow and PTSD, but I have to say that even at the worst of my depression, I have never felt so lost and discouraged for our country. Yes, I have God's strength and his refuge. But I find, in times like this, I have little patience to wait for the seemingly "miracle" it will take to correct and bring back all that has and is being destroyed... Too many people have already been hurt or died...
I think I am like most Americans in many years. I had no reason to be concerned about the political life of America. I was thankful when Nixon was held accountable. I was proud when Obama was elected as President... That's about as far back as I can say I was in any way influenced by politics. During my career at West Virginia University, I had come to know Senator Byrd of West Virginia's activities to support our area, so I naturally turned to the democratic party seeing a man who was constantly involved with his state in one way or another. But I had never really voted or felt a "call" to... The country was moving forward while I was working hard to handle a new job and, hopefully, to move upward in positions on the campus. I became very involved in campus activities based upon the acts coming out of the government to improve people's lives: Civil Rights, Equal Pay Guidelines, Affirmative Action, Women's Concerns, The Disabilities Act... So many things that I wholeheartedly felt that the government had my back... And yet, even then, I have learned through reading that there were always those behind the scenes instigating changes, inciting prejudice...Only to see it fling the doors wide open in 2015...
When a group of those in the Evangelical sect of Christianity chose to support Donald Trump for president. I was shocked, mainly because I had already heard the "grab 'em by" tape... Then as I read a woman writing books discussing the Biblical Hebrew language translation, suddenly decide that she was grateful that Trump... Huh? What is going on... I even wrote questioning her and got no response... How could these people be supporting such a man as we were finding out more and more about his actions toward women, toward anybody who was not white, and even to those who were openly marching against Jews... Even now as I write, I begin to cry, upset. How could this be happening here in the country which once received a statue of liberty from France in honor of our freedom and welcome to all peoples...
This was the America that, my mother had quickly declared to me that I was an American, when I had asked about my heritage... She must have been devastated by the Nazi actions in the war and wanted me to not even think about my heritage... Now the Nazi flag and followers were part of the followers that attacked Our Nation's Capitol on January 6th! Incited by the past-president who now may never be held accountable! THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING IN AMERICA, I CRY, YET IT IS! I find I am glad my mother is not here at a time when Nazi sympathizers play a role in the act of insurrection...
During the Trump administration, I was spending a lot of time glued to CNN, and later, MSNBC, which I found had more of a diversified news staff, which I appreciated... However, after he was at last voted out and yet kept on being part of political news, I could no longer deal with it emotionally. I chose to tape only The Last Word. I like the commentator, who had a background in Congress and I would listen to him each morning to catch up on the latest mess that was being created by the republican party affecting our lives.
It was on The Last Word that I first heard and learned of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse--and his books--who was keeping on top of what corruption was being done within the Supreme Court! I found a champion in his keen dedication to discover the Truth!
I have always been concerned about those who lie and refuse to accept responsibility, even if only saying a "I'm sorry." I've faced it in my own personal life and I of course constantly saw the former president refusing to acknowledge what we all heard him say as truth. And then lie about anything and anybody. I remember well the Kavanaugh trial. I believed the woman who was a professor, who accused him and watched his face as he tried to obfuscate rather than answer. Whitehouse notes that none of the investigations on questionable actions for candidates or the justices have ever been done.
It was bad enough for me to watch the former president in his constant lies, but, we now face the fact that the Supreme Court has become so bold that they are acting as planned in what is being openly announced that the republican party is moving toward. A Civil War (without the guns?) I have chosen not to read the 800+ page 2025 manifesto that SPECIFIEs what they plan to do... It should be noted that this is not a congressional document of the republican party... The little I have heard is totally repulsive to a woman, to a Christian who strives to follow Jesus' command to love one another as we love ourselves... At this time in America, I quickly point out that I believe this is a broader and higher goal, similar to the "do no harm" philosophical statement. None of us are capable of not lashing out from time to time, but, I hope, the majority of us do not move to act to the detriment of other people...
And yet,,, The Scheme clarifies just how wrong my thinking has been... (Notice the expanded title!)
The Title Tells You Exactly What Has Happened! And we saw it happening... For instance, remember the Republican Majority Leader during Obama's presidency who refused to bring to Congress his appointment to the Supreme Court, using lies and delays...? That was the first step of The Scheme... Here are just a few selected excerpts. I recommend this book be read immediately if you value our Democracy... I'll be writing more once I get further into the book...
Justice removed, then, what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers? —SAINT AUGUSTINE
This book is dedicated to the small brave band of writers, researchers, and scientists who investigate and report on the poisonous creep of secret influence into America’s democracy.
...there’s no reason climate should be a “red” or “blue” issue—we all represent people who have lost their homes to floods, fires, or hurricanes; who have seen crops, herds, or fisheries suffer; who have had their air and water polluted. How had we gone so quickly from regular, bipartisan Senate work on climate change to gridlock? As I dug deeper, the parts fell into place. Citizens United had allowed the fossil fuel industry to use its massive money advantage to strike at this bipartisan progress, and it struck hard. Once the Supreme Court gave it the green light, the fossil fuel industry set its political forces to work instantly, targeting pro-climate-action candidates, particularly Republicans. Congressman Bob Inglis, for instance, was run out of the Republican Party over his climate heresy, crushed in a primary; being “Inglissed” became a word. A lurking climate denial apparatus, funded with anonymous money, shifted into high gear. Outside spending in 2010’s congressional races increased by more than $200 million over the previous midterm elections—a nearly 450 percent increase.2 My climate speeches became less about polar bears, pteropods, and science, and more about the fossil fuel industry’s dark-money front groups, which at any given time numbered sixty or more. I got my education in the dark arts of climate denial. I realized that dark money was the other side of the climate denial coin (as quipped by the republican party.) On several occasions, I rounded up Senate colleagues to speak in chorus about the “Web of Denial” that dark money funded to block climate action. I came to know the brave band of scientists who track this climate denial operation. I studied, and I learned. There was a lot of pain and anguish behind those climate speeches, and some anger, too. At the end of the day, I don’t know whether my long and often solitary effort accomplished a thing to advance the cause of climate legislation. I was up against the biggest political manipulation and disinformation campaign in modern history. My effort was probably a failure, a lost cause. I couldn’t not do it, however; I had to try, even if I was only beating my head against a wall. It was frustrating and maddening, and in the end perhaps in vain, but it accomplished one thing: it gave me an education into the massive dark money apparatus set up by the fossil fuel industry. So when the decision-making of the Supreme Court began to smell bad, when its decisions seemed increasingly outcome-oriented rather than reasoned in accordance with long-standing judicial principles, I had the instinct to look for dark money and phony front groups. Sure enough, not only did I find them, I found many of the same front groups and donor conduits that I knew from climate denial. They turned up, for instance, when the EPA issued its first-ever plan to limit carbon emissions from power plants and five conservative justices (then including Justice Scalia) blocked the law while it was still under review in the lower courts, before it had even reached them. This was a procedural eyebrow-raiser of a ruling without precedent in U.S. history, one that I reckon saved the fossil fuel industry $100 billion per year...
It’s easy to do the math. For simplicity, let’s use the $400 million from the hearing testimony. If you spend $400 million and get a $100 billion annual payback, you make your Court-capture investment back 1,000 times in four years. And that doesn’t count all the other helpful decisions a captured Court could provide. Capturing the Supreme Court is a lucrative scheme.
REGULATORY CAPTURE
The Scheme to capture the Court has its roots in “regulatory capture.” Decades of research shows that when you regulate an industry, some actors in that industry don’t take it well. They don’t like oversight, much less oversight that is based on observable facts, that is informed by knowledgeable input and public comment, and that is implemented by career experts who know the industry well. A classic response by regulated entities has been to try to “capture” the agency meant to be overseeing them. A straight-up bribe could land you in prison, so capture is a longer and subtler game. This is a game with tactics. First and foremost, you try to control who gets appointed to the agency, and stack it with friends of industry. Put people in charge who will decide things your way. You can more or less take the agency over this way. You can also make sure that friendly members get cushy, well-paid, low-effort jobs when they leave the agency (the proverbial “revolving door”), and that the ones who are not sufficiently friendly get a cold shoulder. That sends a message. You can launch lobbyists at Congress to threaten the agency, putting its funding at risk or challenging its powers. You can bury the agency in paper blizzards of data, or burn its resources with endless litigation. You can develop pet theories that steer the agency toward the outcomes you seek. And you can promote a culture of chumminess so regulators forget they are supposed to be the referees and instead begin to see themselves as the pals of the regulated industry. This is what many people think happened with the SEC in the years leading up to the Great Recession, and what had happened at the Minerals Management Service prior to the massive explosion of BP’s drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Capture is a well-documented phenomenon. Hundreds of academic articles in dozens of academic journals have been written on regulatory capture, sometimes called “agency capture.”5 Big industries capturing agencies of government is a well-known and well-chronicled practice. For decades, this sordid practice was focused on regulatory agencies. It would have been indecent to think of our courts of justice, let alone our Supreme Court, as just another agency to be captured. But once someone had that idea, once that Rubicon of indecency was crossed, once powerful forces turned their arsenal on the Court, little stood between the Court and those weapons of capture. Once the decision was made to capture it, the Court fell with almost no resistance at all. Regulatory capture became Court capture.
COVERT OPS
In the same way that ordinary decency kept regulatory capture efforts away from the Supreme Court, until it didn’t, ordinary decency kept covert ops tactics overseas against foreign targets, until it didn’t. Regulatory capture and covert operations became the methodology of the Scheme. Intelligence agencies around the world use covert operations to meddle secretly in other countries’ affairs. The United States has used covert operations to disrupt our foreign adversaries, and the Soviet Union, and now Russia, have been particularly adept at deploying these techniques in satellite nations and within their self-proclaimed sphere of influence. Russia has recently begun targeting us with “information warfare” as well. There is a tradecraft to deploying that malign influence in other nations and disrupting what might otherwise be a functioning political and social system. The techniques of covert disinformation and manipulation will be familiar to anyone who’s a fan of spy novels: agents who pretend to be something other than they really are, hidden funding sources, co-opted local organizations, front groups that obscure who’s behind the covert op, false propaganda launched to drive division and spread disinformation. Players in this shadow world persist at falsehoods even when caught lying. Truth isn’t the point in covert operations; disinformation is deployed purposefully to drive social discontent, with the purpose secretly to control elements of the society.Our well-known Conman is a master at this!)
Covert ops are a good model for understanding a key element of court capture: it has to be clandestine. David Robarge, the chief historian of the Central Intelligence Agency, has explained that covert intelligence actions are usually not secretive in their impact—“the whole point … is to make things different … you want people to notice.”6 The trick is in hiding the hand that is pulling the strings and driving the operation. To run its climate denial “op,” the fossil fuel industry borrowed heavily from the covert ops playbook. And the Scheme borrowed heavily from fossil fuel’s climate denial operation. Both operations secretly control things, hide their identities, and can lie with impunity. Staying covert often means evading the laws that require financial transparency and disclosure—laws that are wildly popular across the American political spectrum. An elected official who wants to stay in office long can’t very well repeal those laws. But an unelected, unaccountable set of Supreme Court justices can. In fact, they already have.
Remember all those activities that I talked about that were created to support individuals in America, well, I've had to sit watching as announcements are being made of removing all those "restrictive" policies that are used to protect discrimination against individuals. Dark Money sees no American as worthy of attention...
There you have it on this July 4th, 2024... Imagine, the Dark Money that is funding much of what is happening could be from leaders of those countries who are authoritarian...who don't want us to be a successful Democracy... Money like that given to both of the Trump family members who were holding positions within the last president's administration. Deals were made for personal gain by both of them...
Whitehouse's book supports and documents all that we have been hearing about what Trump will do if he is elected IN JUST A FEW MONTHS! It makes it quite clear that what is being planned would eliminate a democracy by the people, for the people...meaning that voting just may NOT be in our future... Or, it would be a fake election such as that held by Putin in Russia. Instead there will be a king, whoever he may be, will really be a stooge for those holding the dark money that is out there being used to destroy the American Democracy... This is real, folks. And in my opinion, if you are not doing something to prevent it, you will have no right to be upset now or in the future. If you've never voted before, think hard! I didn't vote much before 2016. But you can be very sure that I will be voting AGAINST TRUMP and his cronies down ballot... I've read enough that documents the news being provided on legitimate stations. The 2024 Election may affect you and your children's lives... forever...
Today? Plan To Ensure Voting for the Democratic President and down the ballot... The Scheme has been developed to affect any form of government down to school boards to reflect only what somebody else other than YOU will rule... That is a Reality--a loss of our democracy (personal freedom)--That I Pray Will NEVER OCCUR! DO IT FOR YOUR KIDS! We have already lost many children because of the dark money provided by the NRA which prevents members of Congress from acting on gun control...Yes, It Can Get Worse!
