I don’t have a lot on this yet, but I wanted to flag to see if anyone here might have any insight. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) was on Rachel Maddow about 45 minutes ago to talk about the Democratic effort to prevent Mitch McConnell and the GOP from confirming a Trump nominee to Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s SCOTUS seat. He said something quite provocative during this interview.
After outlining how the right wing has used the courts in general, and SCOTUS in particular, to achieve policy outcomes that they could never hope to win in Congress — such as unlimited corporate money in politics — Whitehouse claimed that
“The fact of the matter is that a small group of very big donor interests — powered up by Citizens United dark money...has now the power to pull strings and to drive behavior and they’ve determined that they want to control the Court.”
Whitehouse argued that this operation explains GOP behavior towards the Court since the death of Justice Scalia. From the refusal to even meet with President Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland to the confirmation of Brett Kavanagh to the blatant hypocrisy on display since the passing of Justice Ginsburg, Whitehouse contends that GOP Senators are being driven to take on such unpopular positions by these shadowy interests.
Surprisingly, Maddow did not ask Whitehouse if he had any information on these groups or the donors supporting them. It did seem as if Whitehouse was not ready to disclose such information if he had it, but I would’ve liked her to ask the question to confirm if this was the case.
Sen. Whitehouse concluded by saying that “They’re up to 80 of these partisan 5 to 4 decisions under Roberts, and we’ve looked at the worst ones but we’ve missed the pattern. There’s a pattern here, and there is a[n] organization behind it, and if we don’t take that on, we are making a huge strategic mistake.”
Perhaps the Senator is trying to push his Democratic colleagues to go deeper and out the dark money forces at work here. I would hope that he would be able to unite the caucus around this strategy, but lord knows we’ve been disappointed many times before at Democratic timidity in the face of partisan right wing attacks and big money donors.