On tonight’s Rachel Maddow Show, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) became the first Democrat that I’m aware of to lay down the gauntlet as to what is really going on with the hypocritical Republican power grab that’s about to result in a 6-3 right-wing conservative majority: This is what Republicans have been and are being ordered to do by their owners.
I’ve written many, many times that the Republican Party only exists to serve and obey the wealthy, powerful men, corporations and industries that own it; to minimize their burdens, maximize their profits, and see to it that they’re never held accountable for the harm they cause to the public, workers, consumers and the environment. Most of us here, I think, understand this — it’s the only way to make sense of the GOP’s actual governing record — but I’ve never heard a Democratic politician acknowledge or articulate that that’s what Republicans are doing, whether by cutting their owners’ taxes, eliminating health, safety and environmental regulations, or, most significantly, by stacking the courts.
Tonight, Maddow invited Whitehouse, a member of the Judiciary Committee, to opine on his Republican colleagues’ blatant and utterly shameless flip-flopping on the “principles” they declared four-and-a-half years ago regarding Supreme Court vacancies in election years, and Whitehouse got straight to the point:
I hope we think of it as a clue. Why all the hypocrisy? Why the mendacity? Why has Mitch McConnell eliminated legislation in the Senate? … I think that it points to the operation that has been run for some time, that unfortunately we as Democrats have not paid enough attention to, that is driving this behavior: The biggest donors behind the Republican Party want to control the Court, and they want that more than anything else. That’s why they stuck with Kavanaugh through his troubles; that’s why they blew out [Merrick] Garland for [Neil] Gorsuch. … These aren’t colleagues who are just doing this because it’s their nature. They’re doing it because of pressure.
Whitehouse also talked about “hundreds of millions of dollars being spent, and phony front groups being set up; all of the earmarks of a covert operation ... being run against our own government,” referring to some unspecified “reporting” to that effect that I’m not personally aware of. Maddow asks what the public should understand about “the real forces at work here” behind McConnell’s and the GOP’s prioritization of judicial appointments, and “who is really calling the shots”; Whitehouse said that
a small group of very big donor interests, powered-up by … dark money … a new phenomenon, since Citizens United, has now the power to pull strings and to drive behavior, and they’ve determined that they want to control the Court, because the Court … will do undemocratic things … that legislators would never vote for, like, for instance, unlimited money into politics from corporations. No one would vote for that; control the Court, and they deliver it.
Whitehouse says that this is a “pattern” of the Roberts Court that Democrats have “missed,” and are making “a huge strategic mistake” if they don’t take on the fact that “there is an organization behind it.”
The interview ends there and I have to say it seemed like a very short discussion; I’m not sure Maddow was ready for Whitehouse to come out and say, this bluntly, that Republicans are being paid, ordered, and pressured by “big donor interests” — I call them the GOP’s owners — to put on this pageant of hypocrisy and cynicism and mendacity in order to “deliver,” in a wholly-undemocratic way, the policy outcomes that its owners want but that “no one would vote for.”
We’ll see if Whitehouse’s vague allegations about this “covert operation” by this unnamed “organization” get any traction, either among Democrats or in the political press. But I was glad to hear someone with influence finally come out and say what I’ve been saying for some time: the Republican Party is in thrall to the men, corporations and industries that own it, and will do their bidding without regard to how badly it harms the country and its people.