The general feeling that the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court is the capstone of a lavishly funded, long-term conservative plan to own the federal judiciary for the foreseeable future, and that Barrett's career is altogether a product of that project, has hung over the confirmation hearings like a foul mist. On Tuesday afternoon, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse gave that feeling form and substance, and charts, too.
Whitehouse used every one of his allotted 30 minutes to describe in detail the mechanisms by which conservative activists, fueled by the unlimited corporate money unleashed by Citizens United v. FEC, have fashioned to produce judicial nominees—and, ultimately, judges—on what in the last decade has looked very much like an ideological assembly line. Whitehouse showed in (occasionally excruciating) detail every aspect of the complicated network at the center of which is the Federalist Society, the intellectual wingnut-welfare chop-shop to which this president* outsourced the selection of federal judges.
He then tied all that research into the current full-court press across the federal courts to kill the Affordable Care Act, curb reproductive freedom, and reverse marriage equality, to say nothing of the dozens of cases regarding the money power and corporate control of government that are the real goals of most of the people funding what Whitehouse called, "the schemes." Whitehouse even worked in his favorite statistic—that on those kind of cases, there have been 80 decisions handed down by the current court as 5-4 decision, and the business/conservative side of those cases, which almost always coincides with the interests of Republican donors, is 80-0.
Whitehouse has been a lone voice on what he calls "court capture" for a while now and, on Tuesday, given a half hour, he took his audience, both live and via television, and including the nominee herself, on a tour of the swamp. In doing so, he made a more compelling case against the illegitimacy of this nominating process than anyone else has. He showed the connections between the Federalist Society and the Judicial Crisis Network, and he showed the outsized influence of Leonard Leo and Carrie Severino, activists who have been the puppeteers behind many of these nominations. (Leo headed up the work at the Federalist Society and Severino ran the Judicial Crisis Network. When Leo quit, Severino moved over and replaced him.) Whitehouse turned the machine around and pulled out all the wires.
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