Sheldon Whitehouse, Senator from Rhode Island, has been on a mission to take down the Supreme Court because he doesn’t like the conservative majority.
Whitehouse embarrassed himself during the Kavanaugh hearings with intense cross-examination of Kavanaugh’s high school entries — lacking any self-awareness that people were laughing at him not with him. Read it for a good laugh, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse grilled Brett Kavanaugh about a high school yearbook fart joke. Seriously.
Lack of self-awareness is not surprising since Whitehouse was born with a silver spoon in his mouth:
Whitehouse is the great-great-grandson of the West Coast railroad baron Charles Crocker, and with an estimated net worth of more than $6 million, he is reportedly the Ocean State’s wealthiest politician…. Whitehouse came from a socially and politically connected family — his father dated Jacqueline Bouvier before she married JFK and was known to enjoy fox hunting — and when he returned stateside, he followed a classic blue-blood educational track: prep school at St. Paul’s in New Hampshire; college at Yale; law school at the University of Virginia.
Whitehouse’s signature is attacking people at very personal levels without a sense of shame or ability to view himself as anything other than a holy crusader. One of his most notorious moments was when he compared opponents of Obamacare to Nazis during Kristallnacht and people who lynched blacks. Dana Milbank at WaPo noted at the time:
… Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.) had just delivered an overwrought jeremiad comparing the Republicans to Nazis on Kristallnacht, lynch mobs of the South, and bloodthirsty crowds of the French Revolution.“Too many colleagues are embarked on a desperate, no-holds-barred mission of propaganda, obstruction and fear,” he said. “History cautions us of the excesses to which these malignant, vindictive passions can ultimately lead. Tumbrils have rolled through taunting crowds. Broken glass has sparkled in darkened streets. Strange fruit has hung from southern trees.” Assuming the role of Old Testament prophet, Whitehouse promised a “day of judgment” and a “day of reckoning” for Republicans.
Whitehouse spins conspiracy theories about right wing “dark money” taking over the Supreme Court nomination process while ignoring the much more vast and enriched left-wing dark money funding Whitehouse and his allies, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse Hates ‘Dark Money,’ Except When It Goes To Democrats Like Sheldon Whitehouse. Whitehouse himself even nominated a Democrat megadonor who also donated to Whitehouse for a federal judgeship.
If you read nothing else, read these two posts:
The Supreme Court conservative Justices have been particular targets of Whitehouse:
I can’t find a statement by Whitehouse condemning the attempted assassination of his favorite target Brett Kavanaugh. But Whitehouse’s Twitter feed is filled with invective trying to delegitimize the court:
Our Supreme Court cannot handle its own ethics problems. We all see that clearly. [June 19, 2022]Then, they create an echo chamber of approval for their cultivated fringe ideas. The ideas get bounced around through other anonymously-funded affiliate groups, through law school clubs and conservative conferences – and ultimately to the Supreme Court. [June 15, 2022]A political party violated every norm to achieve their majority on the Supreme Court, overturn Roe, and impose their ideology on millions who don’t agree with them. How are Americans supposed to have any faith in this system? [May 14, 2022]I’m heading to the Senate floor to unmask the scheme to control our Supreme Court – a scheme now poised to destroy a woman’s right to make decisions about her body. [May 10, 2022]Republicans devised a decades-long scheme to capture our Supreme Court. Their reward is The Court That Dark Money Built, which delivers wins for corporate special interests – every single time. [April 16, 2022]What plays out here in the Judiciary Committee with Supreme Court nominations is often driven and directed in other places, and the real action is too often offstage, in an archipelago of right-wing, dark money front groups that are out to capture the Court. [April 4, 2022]
Now Whitehouse is obssessed with Ginny Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas. Prof. Jonathan Turley notes how unseemly Whitehouse has been:
In Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Cecily observes “I have never met any really wicked person before… I am so afraid he will look just like every one else.” The quote came to mind this week after Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) demanded an investigation of Ginni Thomas. Whitehouse insists that there is a “big investigative gap” in pursuing the leaker of the draft Supreme Court opinion in the pending abortion case, but not the wife of Clarence Thomas. Ginni Thomas supported the challenge to the certification of the 2020 election.Even in the age of rage, the investigation of the spouse of a sitting justice due to her political views is shocking….The position of Ginni Thomas on the election was no surprise. She is a well-known Republican activist and Trump supporter. In her communications, Thomas encouraged then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to pursue legal and legislative challenges to what she viewed as a stolen election. That was a position supported by millions of voters….On MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” Sen. Whitehouse mocked “how Chief Justice Roberts went to DEFCON 1 over the leak of the Alito abortion opinion and demanded investigations and said it was a betrayal of the court.”Yet, he noted “If you look at the Ginni Thomas situation … it seems to me that when you have the spouse of the Supreme Court justice now repeatedly connected with an insurrection against the country and now connected with an individual who is so deeply in trouble that a White House, a Trump White House legal counsel advised him to get a criminal defense attorney, that if you are going to go to DEFCON 1 over the leak of a draft opinion, you might want to consider going to DEFCON 3 or 4 or 5 and start investigating within the court what the heck is going on here.” He asked why Chief Justice Roberts is “unwilling to look at its own problems as regards Justice Thomas.”The reason may be that leaking the opinion is clearly unethical and potentially criminal conduct. What Ginni Thomas did is called free speech. Thomas had every right to call for a challenge to the election even though some of us viewed the effort as unfounded. Marriage to a justice does not come with some form of indentured servitude where you must suspend the exercise of constitutional rights like freedom of speech.
Sheldon Whitehouse’s war on the Supreme Court just took a particularly insidious turn, but unlike his obsessions with Brett Kavanaugh’s “boofing” and “ralphing,” Whitehouse’s latest obsession is nothing to laugh about. It’s part of a rising tide of Democrat rhetoric inciting activists against the conservative Justices.
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