Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) arrived in the Senate in 2007, three years before the watershed moment — he says — that drastically changed how the U.S. operates and how its vast resources are allocated. That moment came in 2010 with the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Citizens United decision.
Until then, Whitehouse says, billionaires and the oil industry were limited in how they could impact government function — limited in what kind of favors they could purchase from representatives through campaign funding largesse.
The turnabout caused by Citizens United, Whitehouse says, “gave the industry the weaponry to kill climate bipartisanship [and] Republicans quickly caved on climate — and were rewarded with massive, secret money from oil and gas behemoths.”
What followed was a “fossil fuel industry climate blockade operation” that “ran in parallel with a longstanding dark-money plan to capture the Supreme Court,” as Whitehouse outlines in a recent editorial covering much of the same ground as his Senate floor video series, The Scheme, of which there is an example below.
[Whitehouse begins by “listening to Sen. Sanders describe what happens to a country when billionaires are able to secretly exert immense political power and drive democracy away from its foundations.”]
Whitehouse puts a staggering number on the price of this SCOTUS “capture” result, saying “fossil fuel billionaires could now protect in Congress fossil fuel’s $660 billion annual U.S. subsidy.” Sheldon’s statistic matches an estimate by the International Monetary Fund on the real cost to taxpayers of the current climate policy.
“The essential foundation of a democracy is a well-informed citizenry,” Sheldon says in introducing the editorial. “Dark money undermines transparency and stands in the way of progress, but sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
The essential foundation of a democracy is a well-informed citizenry. Dark money undermines transparency and stands in the way of progress, but sunlight is the best disinfectant.
— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) October 12, 2023
Check out my latest op-ed for @Public_Citizen:https://t.co/YiCybiPZc2
