U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) tried to strip away extraneous speculation about the Supreme Court’s decision yesterday to consider former President Donald Trump‘s immunity argument, and to potentially reverse a unanimous decision by a 3-judge panel at the appellate level.
This presents an epic self-test of the Supreme Court. One of two things will likely be true: https://t.co/OgsVMvLUF6
— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) February 29, 2024
Whitehouse cut to the heart of the matter as he sees it, calling the moment an “epic self-test of the Supreme Court” — already under an ethics microscope — with only two possible outcomes, broadly speaking.
They will quickly follow clear precedent and constitutional text and dispense with the immunity argument 9-0 in time to permit the case to proceed.
This is Bush v. Gore 2.0 with Republican justices stepping in to influence a presidential outcome by interfering in an ongoing prosecution.
Whitehouse goes further, however, in directly characterizing the second outcome as the preference of the Republican donor class because of their enormous financial interest in the oil industry — or “Big Oil.”
[This donor class contains billionaires like Harlan Crow and others whom Whitehouse has elsewhere derided as “creepy billionaires” — individuals who have paid for Clarence Thomas‘s vacations and his mother’s home and cozied up to Samuel Alito in ways Whitehouse and others have excoriated as corrupt.]
But what does the donor class want for all its largesse? To frame the answer, Whitehouse uses a famous directive from All The President’s Men: “Follow the money.”
Despite prominent initiatives on the right like the promotion of anti-abortion legislation and loosening of gun restrictions, Whitehouse asserts that the main goal of the Republican donor class — “big donors who have packed the court — is to reinstate Trump to “protect their ‘freedom to pollute.’”
Just as evangelicals who may not have appreciated Trump’s lifestyle chose him as a soldier in the war against abortion, Big Oil, Whitehouse asserts, has also chosen Trump. Now it wants to see its investment in a “dark money right-wing donor scheme to capture and control the Supreme Court” pay off.
Obviously the big donors who’ve packed the Court want Trump, primarily to protect their “freedom to pollute.” But will the Court follow their direction? That’s the test.
— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) February 29, 2024
Whitehouse, who counts himself among those lawmakers who consider climate change an existential threat, has been unambiguous in naming Big Oil as the perpetrator of that threat. Now he contends that the Supreme Court — if it decides to take the second path he describes (another Bush v. Gore) will do so to help Trump help Big Oil escape responsibility for pollution.