Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee from which he repeatedly decries the lack of ethics currently on display in what he calls our nation’s “captured” Supreme Court. “Creepy billionaires” is Whitehouse’s term for conservative agenda setters like Clarence Thomas‘s generous benefactor Harlan Crow, the Texas oil industry figure who has figured for Thomas as a “friend with benefits.”
Whitehouse’s other chief targets are climate change deniers and Big Oil (beyond just Crow), an industry he routinely accuses of pilfering America’s natural resources and stable future — while essentially bribing those in power to let them do it. And now, Whitehouse warns, things are about to get worse by orders of magnitude.
Whitehouse apparently hasn’t gotten the notice about Democrats needing to look in the mirror and blame themselves for the current predicament. While recognizing that stronger messaging and new paths to electoral victories must be established, it remains Whitehouse’s view that just because the MAGA con and dark money “capture” have worked doesn’t make them right — no matter how many voters the disingenuous propaganda influenced and disinformed.
Instead of Democratic navel-gazing while President-elect Donald Trump readies his transition back to Washington, Whitehouse is — unlike many cowed Dems — on the offensive.
“Trump is a felon, a liar and a cheat; that won’t change,” Whitehouse posted this week. “The creepy billionaires who put him there will be coming for plunder. It’s a safe bet that epic corruption will stain the Trump years.”
With dark and stark warnings about what’s ahead for Americans as the oligarchy secures its prize, Whitehouse writes, calling Big Oil’s dark money political influence and its ravaging of the environment “likely the biggest fraud in human history.”
Doubt me? Just look at how the fossil fuel mob co-opted the Republican Party as collaborators in their scheme of lies and dark-money influence about climate.
We have allowed ourselves to normalize what is likely the biggest fraud in human history.
— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) November 7, 2024
Whitehouse, calling Trump administration corruption “inevitable,” says that those whose power hasn’t been stripped away entirely by a new MAGA administration with House and Senate majorities must do everything possible to fight back as “predatory special interests seek to feed themselves at the expense of our economy and environment.”
Whitehouse appears to believe that the con will only be exposed by what it does to business and living conditions — specifically how insurance companies, which don’t have the luxury to ignore the reality of climate change, withdraw from supplying insurance from critical areas because the risk is too high.
That will set in motion an inability to secure mortgages and housing and pricing problems, a situation that he says has already beset Florida, a deeply red state that already suffers the most from MAGA policy and its “drill, baby, drill” ethos making large swaths of its real estate uninsurable.
It will become increasingly obvious to the American people that Republicans lied to them, and did so for campaign money.
— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) November 10, 2024
Whitehouse implies that no amount of media will sway the minds of those distracted by culture wars — fiddling while Rome burns, in essence. It is only the economic impact of these MAGA policies made manifest that can make people see clearly what is at stake.
Campaign politics was once famously reduced to the slogan “it’s the economy, stupid” — and Whitehouse is saying a similar thing now: that the comeuppance due for ceding America’s future to “creepy billionaires” will be economic hardship, which even a preoccupied electorate will be forced to reckon with.
When the bill comes in it “will become increasingly obvious to the American people that Republicans lied to them,” Whitehouse says, having been unable to detect all the other clues.
Climate chaos is already disrupting insurance markets around the country — the leading edge of an economic storm as insurance markets, and then mortgage markets, and then property values, head for a crash.
— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) November 10, 2024