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https://ethicsalarms.com/2025/07/11/pro-tip-dont-extol-sen-sheldon-whitehouse-because-it-will-make-you-look-like-an-idiot/
Pro Tip: Don’t Extol Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse Because It Will Make You
Look Like An Idiot
July 11, 2025 / Jack Marshall
For your early morning reading pleasure, I give you Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s 4,568th (approximately) unhinged rant about climate change
and how evil conservatives are destroying, oh, everything. I saw this
dog’s breakfast “liked” and “loved” on Facebook by smart people who should know better, and am hoping against hope they didn’t actually read
the thing.
Whitehouse is Little Rhodey’s senior U.S. Senator, Democrat of course,
and his speech this week on the Senate floor (several members had to be hospitalized after they rolled their eyes too hard) was reflexively
praised by “The Nation,” which employs far, far, FAR left lunatic Elie Mystal as an editor.
[Digression: You remember Elie, don’t you? He can only appear in public
now on MSNBC without being chased by men in white coats carrying
butterfly nets. He was too extreme for the left-biased legal gossip rag “Above the Law,” which published his radical nonsense before he went completely bonkers. Elie has opined that all black jurors should always
vote to acquit black defendants no matter hwo guilty they are. Nice. (I
wonder what the ABA would say if juries paid any attention to him?) More recently he called for foreign nations to issue sanctions against the U.S.]
Read it. Or at least try. I dare you. I double dare you. First, it is
garbled, rambling and incoherent (not unlike this), perhaps not quite
Authentic Frontier Gibberish, but too close to be tolerated from a U.S. Senator. Second, and this has always been true of his rants, Whiethouse obviously doesn’t understand climate change science at all, like all hysterics who want the U.S. to spend trillions and cripple the economy
based on speculation. This country can’t slow down climate change,
whatever it is, without the vast majority of the world joining in and
they won’t, don’t and can’t. This includes giant countries India and China. Does Whitehouse really not comprehend this, or is he just pimping
for a world dictatorship? Oh, who knows? There is no justification for
paying any attention to him, ever.
Whitehouse has, for example, repeatedly said that Americans who oppose
the climate change “consensus” should be imprisoned. To this, law professor/pundit Glenn Reynolds responded,
“First, this man should be voted out of office as soon as human
possible. His ignorance is dangerous. Second, the state bar should
require him to undergo at least 100 hours of mandatory continuing legal education on the subject of constitutional law, with emphasis on the
First Amendment. Newsflash: joining together to discuss common interests
and even–gasp!–funding research, white papers and lobbying efforts to advance one’s perspectives on an issue isn’t illegal; its free speech.”
It should be no surprise that Whitehouse implies that the Texas flood is
the result of evil Republicans and Donald Trump not caring about our
planet slowly burning up, though there is no evidence of the tragedy
being caused by climate change (or DOGE cuts). But he has other villains
to finger: “dark money” that elects those evil Republicans (funny,
getting far more money in donations than Donald Trump didn’t seem to
help Kamala Harris any); “creepy billionaires,” and a “captured Supreme Court.” In fact, I can’t let this pass; here is that part of the rant:
A captured Supreme Court puts an entire branch of government under
hidden political control, with no electoral remedy to its bad decisions,
thanks to lifetime appointments of the captured justices. Capture of our Supreme Court has caused lasting damage already, deforming our
constitutional order. The same interests always winning is observable,
as is the statistical improbability of that, and it degrades faith in
the Court. Capture rots the Court from within; a billionaire gifts
program, to reward the most amenable justices with ‘lifestyles of the
rich and famous,’ twisted the Court into knots as it tried to prevent
facts from coming out (even potential tax cheating), and to defeat any
real ethics code. That’s all a devilish and rotten business, in a great republic…
Which brings us to the captured Court; The Court That Dark Money Built.
Freeing the Supreme Court from its captured state will not be easy. Too
many justices are willing participants in the capture scheme. If the
Supreme Court justices wanted to redeem their Court, they could have
done it already. They could do it on their own, at any time. But
captured is as captured does. They don’t want to.
It matters on climate. A rejuvenated Court would take the evidence of
climate harm seriously. Over and over, The Court That Dark Money Built
has favored fossil fuel interests. It threw out the Clean Power Plan,
saving industry tens of billions in compliance costs and allowing more
than a dozen years of continued pollution. If the $700 billion fossil
fuel subsidy number is close to right, and if the Clean Power Plan would
have only shaved 10% off the harm, that one decision alone cost
Americans nearly $1 trillion in pollution harms. That’s worth capturing
the Court for if you’re the fossil fuel industry.
The Court created the “major questions” doctrine to give the fossil fuel industry a legal weapon to stop future climate regulations. The Court
withdrew the Chevron doctrine, taking away from experts in the
regulatory process the benefit of the doubt. In all these cases, the
fossil fuel industry got free legal services from Republican attorneys
general, undoubtedly grateful for their fossil fuel political funding.
What a rotten misuse of that badge of office.
To reform the Court, Congress will have to act on two fronts. One is to require a proper ethics code for the Court, including the essential
elements of proper legal process, actual fact-finding and neutral decision-making, not complicated stuff. Rule of law is based on those
two practices. The justices shield themselves from both.
The present Court and its political defenders pretend that fixing this
is impossible, but it’s not. Every state supreme court faces the issue
of administering a proper ethics code for itself, and every single one
has figured it out. Forget impossible, it’s not even hard.
The problem is that the justices (or certain of them) enjoy being the
only nine people in government immune from proper ethics scrutiny. Look
at the billionaire gifts program and you might see why. They violate an ancient principle, so ancient it’s in Latin: nemo judex in sua causa.
No one should judge their own case. As an ethics scholar recently put
it, it’s a conflict of interest to judge one’s own conflict of interest.
The public is ready for more than just real ethics, however. The
present Court’s legacy — of scandals, destruction of precedent,
doctrinal leaps, false fact-finding in cases, and striking patterns in
what interests always win — is damning. Add the unhealthy secrets —
around who chose justices and why, and around the billionaires’ campaign
of gifts to amenable justices, and around tax mischief related to those
gifts — and it’s a mess. The public is ready for term limits, and turnover.
A Court rejuvenated with regular turnover, with its secrets disclosed
and a proper ethics procedure going forward, is a Court that can again
merit the confidence of the American people, and perform the judicial
function honorably.
Imagine, a Democrat arguing that it’s the conservative Justices who
aren’t sufficiently “neutral”: has he read the bonkers dissents coming from the DEI wing of SCOTUS lately? Like the proverbial stopped clock, Whitehouse is right about Clarence Thomas, who should, as I have said
before, resign in shame. But to be lectured on “real ethics” by Sheldon Whitehouse is as infuriating as being lectured by Thomas. Here’s his EA dossier, and I stopped posting on him for the most part because he’s a certified Ethics Dunce. The Senate has ethics rules, but they didn’t
stop Whitehouse from pulling this, for example.
The fact that Senator Whitehouse is a fool, a grandstanding hypocrite,
and a lurking totalitarian makes him an unreliable messenger even if he
were screaming that the sky is blue, but even if he had impeccable
credentials, his message would expose him as a blight on intelligent
discourse. We really elect these people. With that, I have to close,
once again, with the tuneful duet from “Li’l Abner”:
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