“Two-hundred-fifty million dollars is a lot of money to spend if you’re not getting anything for it,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said. “So that raises the question: What are they getting for it ?”
Whitehouse asked that near the end of a 30-minute presentation Tuesday during Senate Judiciary confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett. Whitehouse outlined the well-funded, years-long, conservative dark money effort behind selecting judges and undoing Roe, Obergefell, and the Obamacare cases.
The Center for Media and Democracy has the complete transcript. But to get the full effect, spend the time to watch Whitehouse present his case.
The Washington Post last year in a lengthy expose described how the Federalist Society and its dark-money funders have spent — nay, invested — all that money to get something they badly want. Not just overturning the 80 5-to-4 decisions on the Affordable Care Act and same-sex marriage, and undoing Roe v. Wade. those cases, but much more:
They’re about power. And if you look at those 80 decisions, they fall into four categories over and over and over again. One, unlimited and dark money and politics. Citizens United is the famous one, but it’s continued since with McCutcheon and we’ve got one coming up now. Always the five for unlimited money in politics. Never protecting against money dark money in politics, despite the fact that they said it was going to be transparent.
And who wins when you allow unlimited dark money in politics? A very small group. The ones who have unlimited money to spend and a motive to spend it in politics. They win. Everybody else loses. And if you’re looking at who might be behind this, let’s talk about people with unlimited money to spend and a motive to do it. We’ll see how that goes.
Next, knock the civil jury down. Whittle it down to a nub. The civil jury was in the Constitution, in the Bill of Rights, in our darn Declaration of Independence, but it’s annoying to big corporate powers because you can swagger your way as a big corporate power through Congress. You can go and tell the president you put money into to elect what to do. He will put your stooges at the EPA. It’s all great until you get to the civil jury, because they have an obligation, as you know, Judge Barrett, they have an obligation under the law to be fair to both parties irrespective of their size.
You can’t bribe them. You’re not allowed to. It’s a crime to tamper with the jury. It’s standard practice to tamper with Congress. And they make decisions based on the law. If you’re used to being the boss and swaggering your way around the political side, you don’t want to be answerable before a jury. And so one after another, these 80 5-to-4 decisions have knocked down, whittled away at, the civil jury, a great American institution.
Third – first was unlimited dark money, second was demean and diminish the civil jury – third is weaken regulatory agencies. A lot of this money, I’m convinced, is polluter money. The Koch Industries is a polluter, the fossil fuel industry is a polluter. Who else would be putting buckets of money into this and wanting to hide who they are behind DonorsTrust or other schemes?
And what are – if you’re a big polluter – what do you want? You want weak regulatory agencies. You want ones that you can box up and run over to Congress and get your friends to fix things for you in Congress. Over and over and over again, these decisions are targeted at regulatory agencies to weaken their independence and weaken their strength. And if you’re a big polluter, a weak regulatory agency is your idea of a good day.
And the last thing is in politics. In voting. Why on earth the Court made the decision, a factual decision – not something appellate courts are ordinarily supposed to make, as I understand it Judge Barrett – the factual decision that nobody needed to worry about minority voters in preclearance states being discriminated against, or that legislators would try to knock back their ability to vote. These five made that finding in Shelby County against bipartisan legislation from both houses of Congress, hugely passed, on no factual record.
They just decided that that was a problem that was over, on no record with no basis, because it got them to the result that we then saw. What followed? State after state after state passed voter suppression laws. One so badly targeting African Americans that two courts said it was surgically, surgically tailored to get after minority voters.
And gerrymandering, the other great control. Bulk gerrymandering where you go into a state, like the Red Map project did in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and you pack Democrats so tightly into a few districts that all the others become Republican majority districts. And in those states, you send a delegation to Congress that has a huge majority of Republican members, like 13 to 5, as I recall, in a state where the five, the party of the five actually won the popular vote.
You’ve sent a delegation to Congress that is out of step with the popular vote of that state and court after court figured out how to solve that, and the Supreme Court said nope. 5 to 4 again. Nope. We’re not going to take an interest in that question. In all these areas where it’s about political power for big special interests, and people who want to fund campaigns, and people who want to get their way through politics without actually showing up, doing it behind DonorsTrust and other groups, doing it through these schemes over and over and over again, you see the same thing.
Preserving democracy and the U.S. Constitution is not their goal. Preserving their control is. To that end, quietly and out of public view, they whittle away the parts of the U.S. Constitution that annoy them, rendering them inoperative. Calling them oligarchs would be accurate, but far too clinical.
Sen. John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, complained on Monday, “It hurts to be called a racist. I think it’s one of the worst things you can call an American.” What’s worse is being on the receiving end of racism, something Kennedy did not consider.
But the people Whitehouse described I call royalists: people dedicated to a system of rule by hereditary (or monetary) royalty and landed gentry. They and their Tory hangers-on have been with us since the beginning. There are lots of American racists. They too have been with us since the beginning. But if racist is one of the worst things you can call an American, royalist is worse. Royalists are Americans in name only.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.