Add Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse‘s name to the list of elected officials who think the media are punting on their obligation to present the facts with a strict — and stark — allegiance to reality. To tell it like it is. So he is doing some editing on the side.
Whereas the lion’s share of such media complaints concern the two candidates for president, chiefly frustration with the press’s so-called “sane-washing” of the often extreme or incoherent rhetoric of former President Donald Trump, Whitehouse’s target is the inadequate coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Rhode Island Democrat, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, has been unrelenting in skewering an ethics-challenged SCOTUS he routinely characterizes as a “captured” court — implying that a majority of Justices are at the service of a powerful donor class, of which Harlan Crow, the billionaire benefactor of Justice Clarence Thomas, is just the most egregious example.
To further criticize what he sees as the Supreme Court’s current duplicity and rightward lurch, Whitehouse added a word to an already highly critical article that appeared this week at Vox. The original headline had the word Republican in it once — to describe the court itself. Whitehouse added “Republican” as an adjective for a second time, to identify who the Republican SCOTUS does its bidding for.
Original Vox title: The Republican Supreme Court just blessed an illegal voter purge.
Whitehouse’s revised title: The Republican Supreme Court just blessed a Republican illegal voter purge.
To be more completely accurate: The Republican Supreme Court just blessed a Republican illegal voter purge.https://t.co/u6orwsR8wy
— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) October 30, 2024
Whitehouse’s edit seeks to clarify that, as he assesses it, the “Republican court” has a clientele it works for — and that clientele is the Republican Party. The decision, Whitehouse suggests, is simply an in-kind gift to Republicans legislators from the Republican jurists.
At issue, as Vox describes is the Supreme Court’s “surprising order on Wednesday morning that allows Virginia’s Republican governor to openly defy a federal voting rights law.”
Why surprising? Whitehouse would argue that it’s not surprising at all, but Vox gives a reason for what comes across as an audacious precedent-busting decision allowing what is expressly prohibited by the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA): the original law, Vox reports, is “so clearly written” that “two lower federal courts ordered Virginia to abandon the purge, at least until after the election, and to restore the purged names to the state’s voter rolls.”
The NVRA expressly prohibits states from systematically removing “the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters” within 90 days of national election. The SCOTUS ruling allows the Governor of Virginia to remove registered voters anyway.