Sheldon Whitehouse. What more can we say than we have said in the past in almost 100 posts?In what I believe was my first post about him, on December 21, 2009, I documented how he compared Republican Senators to Nazis for …. (checks notes) … opposing Obamacare. WaPo reported 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.The day’s ugly words were a fitting finale for the whole sorry health-care debate of 2009.
That’s Sheldon. You’re a Nazi and he’s Mother Teresa.
We saw that time and again in the past 15 years. There’s nothing funny about him, and he has no self-awareness, but you probably laughed when he brought his prosecutorial talents to berating Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh about high school yearbook fart jokes:
I don’t think he ever had a childhood, certainly was never a teenager:
He also loves to threaten people, particularly the Supreme Court, Dem Senators to Supreme Court: Rule our way on 2nd Amendment case, or face possible restructuring:
A group of Democratic Senators (Whitehouse, Gillibrand, Hirono, Blumenthal, Durbin) just filed an extraordinarily vitriolic Amicus Brief in support of the Respondent, N.Y. City. The Brief was signed by Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) for the group, listing himself as Counsel of Record.I would not be surprised if Whitehouse substantially drafted the Brief himself. As we have documented here for a decade, Whitehouse is extremely pejorative towards his political opponents, who invariably are portrayed as bad people with bad motives….So it’s no surprise that the Brief signed by Whitehouse attacked Kavanaugh, the conservatives on the Court, and the very existence of the Court itself by suggesting the Court would be restructured if it ruled the wrong way.It was a double-barrel attack — impugning the motives of those holding different views of the 2nd Amendment and threatening to damage the Court’s legitimacy….The closing paragraph was at best a thinly-veiled threat (emphasis added):
The Supreme Court is not well. And the people know it. Perhaps the Court can heal itself before the public demands it be “restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics.” Particularly on the urgent issue of gun control, a nation desperately needs it to heal.
This was not so much a legal argument, but a shot across the bow of the Court and Chief Justice Roberts in particular.
Nice Court you have there, Chief, shame if something happened to it.
You can scroll through our posts to see more. I summed it up in this post in October 2020, during the Amy Coney Barrett nomination when Whitehouse was leading the attack, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse Is A Conspiracy Nutter
But all of Whitehouse’s conspiracy theories amount to nothing more than: Republican donors support conservative judicial nominations in compliance with the law. What he leaves out is that liberal donors do the same thing, maybe on a larger scale, funding groups like Demand Justice to attack Republican nominees. But Sheldon Whitehouse is shocked, just shocked, that Republicans do it.That was on full display today during the hearings for Amy Coney Barrett. Whitehouse didn’t ask a single question of Barrett. Instead, he spent a half hour with charts and posters supposedly showing the grand conspiracy. But again, it amounted to nothing more than Republicans spend money to support conservative nominees — much if not almost all of the money being spent to counter attacks from left wing groups funded by unknown liberal donors.
Ted Cruz had a great retort to this insanity:
Whitehouse, by the way, does not have clean hands himself:
This is all a long-winded but necessary background to today’s declaration of war by Whitehouse.
From Politico:
Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse is calling for DNC delegates to consider how the Democratic Party’s infrastructure can support a “war machine” to lead attacks against Republicans.
The letter to state party chairs ahead of the DNC chair election, shared first with POLITICO, comes as Democrats scramble to figure out how to move forward after nationwide losses at the polls in November. Party leaders have bemoaned Democrats’ inability to define their own identity and push back against Republican attacks.
Whitehouse argued that Democrats have no institutional and centralized setup to attack the GOP, writing Republicans “rapidly and effectively deploy false narratives, while we struggle to bring true ones to bear.”
“We in Congress customarily say we’re ‘fighting’ for things when we really mean working or toiling,” Whitehouse wrote. “A fight means a defined adversary, a battle strategy, and actual punches thrown. Done well, it involves exposing and degrading your adversary’s machinery of warfare.”
The White House could have been a place to helm and plan offensive strategy against Republicans, but it has not effectively been used this way, Whitehouse argued.
The Rhode Island senator, an outspoken critic of so-called dark money in politics, argued that there was an opportunity for Democrats to win goodwill from the electorate by highlighting stories of surreptitious influence peddling. He proposed the addition of an “offensive coordinator” role for the party.
While he didn’t threaten to use nukes, like Eric Swalwell once did, the military imagery and war-like rhetoric were no mistake. It’s a continuation of the type of rhetoric that almost got Brett Kavanaugh killed.
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