“Not enough people know the story about how this court got captured by a bunch of creepy right-wing billionaires,” U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse told hundreds of Iowa Democrats on August 29.
The senator from Rhode Island used much of his speech at the Polk County Steak Fry to describe what he and U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin—another featured speaker at the event in Des Moines—would be able to accomplish as leaders of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, if Democrats gain control of Congress after the November elections.
A “real check and balance”
Whitehouse came to Iowa primarily to support Josh Turek, the Democratic nominee for Iowa’s open U.S. Senate seat. He called himself as “an early believer in Josh’s race.” Having served with former Senator Tom Harkin, Whitehouse sees “a lot of Tom Harkin” in Turek.
A Democratic-controlled Senate would “put a check on the crazy people that Trump is putting into office and into robes,” Whitehouse said. “A Senate with spines of foam, that has rubber stamps instead of gavels, is no way to control this president. You need real checks and balances—the lesson of America is real checks and balances.”
Referring to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Todd Blanche, who were both confirmed by a single vote, Whitehouse promised a Democratic Senate “will be a real check and balance against the Hegseths and the Blanches and the rest of the miscreants and suck-ups and sycophants that he has put into high office.”
He reminded the crowd that President Donald Trump will be in office for the next two years, and “if we can’t stop that nonsense, we can’t fight back against the capture of the Supreme Court.”
“Clean up the mess at the Supreme Court”
Whitehouse said he and Raskin are already meeting monthly to plan their oversight work in the next Congress. “Republicans can block my subpoenas in the Senate with a filibuster. They cannot block a Jamie Raskin House subpoena. So if we’re working together, we can do twice the work. And we’re going to put a lot of attention right away” on this Supreme Court.
Democrats need to “do a lot of investigating,” because “not enough people know the story about how this court got captured by a bunch of creepy right-wing billionaires.”
Among the “simple questions” that merit investigation: “Did Clarence Thomas ever pay his taxes on the quarter-million-dollar loan forgiveness on his motor coach? It’s an easy question to answer: yes, I did, on this date, with this money.”
When they can’t answer those questions, the former Rhode Island attorney general said, “that tells my attorney general investigative mind that there’s an answer there we need to pry the lid open on and see what the hell took place.”
In addition to investigating, a Democratic Congress could legislate. Whitehouse listed three “great fights” Democrats need to have as the majority party: “root the crooked dark money out of our elections,” combat the “climate denial fraud and corruption operation of the fossil fuel industry” (which he connected to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling from 2010), and “clean up the mess at the Supreme Court.”
A “proper ethics code” for the justices
Whitehouse pointed out that the U.S. House and Senate Ethics Committees can do fact-finding when investigating ethics complaints against members of Congress. The same is true for every federal judge—except for the Supreme Court justices. “Those nine have carved themselves out from fact-finding.”
He promised that Democrats will make sure the Supreme Court “has an ethics program that does proper fact-finding.”
While some justices pretend that’s “super-difficult,” the fact is that all 50 state supreme courts “have figured it out.” It’s not even hard, Whitehouse said. “They just don’t want it. But we’re going to force it, and they will have a proper ethics code.”
Term limits for the high court
Finally, Whitehouse called for term limits for Supreme Court justices. Acknowledging there are several ways to accomplish that, he laid out his preferred approach. The bill he has introduced would create 18-year terms and would be retroactive (meaning it would apply to current justices).
The U.S. Constitution states that federal judges have lifetime tenure. But justices who were term-limited out wouldn’t be fired under the Whitehouse proposal. They would be put on senior status, assigned to hear those few cases where the U.S. Supreme Court has original jurisdiction under the Constitution.
The vast majority of the Supreme Court’s docket—”every case you can think of”—comes up through the appellate jurisdiction, Whitehouse explained. The Supreme Court gets to decide those cases “because Congress gave them that power.” Which means Congress can limit their jurisdiction.
“And so you take the senior status ones, you put them someplace nice, and they can wait like the Maytag repairman for those original jurisdiction cases.” (For younger readers: The lonely Maytag repairman was a fixture of TV ads for many years.) Meanwhile, you can “start to clean and purify that system.” That’s what Democrats can do if Iowans send Josh Turek to the Senate this November, Whitehouse said as he was wrapping up.
“You’ve got to explain the decision”
Delivering the last speech at the steak fry, Raskin didn’t present a detailed legislative agenda. Instead, the former constitutional law professor covered broad themes related to U.S. history, the separation of powers, and differences between Republicans and Democrats. “We are the party that stands up for constitutional democracy and freedom for everybody in America.” He assailed Trump’s corruption and abuses of power, usurping Congressional authority by spending money on pet projects, imposing tariffs, and taking the country to war.
Raskin mocked Republican claims about “three coequal branches of government. Really?” Aside from the fact that “coequal” is not even a word,
Are we three equal branches? I don’t think so. Why did James Madison say in the Federalist Papers that Congress was and would always be the leading and preeminent branch of government? Because we had a revolution against a mad king, drunk on power. The framers trusted the representatives of the people—not one guy.
The possible future House Judiciary Committee chair did put one item on the court reform agenda, though. When describing the courts’ role “to say what the law is,” Raskin observed that the lower courts know how to do that. Around 80 percent of legal challenges to Trump administration actions have succeeded at the U.S. District Court or appeals court level.
“Then it gets up to the Twilight Zone,” he said. “The silverware is flying around the room. Anything can happen in the shadow docket. A magisterial, authoritative opinion from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals” can be overturned in a sentence or a paragraph.
“That’s another thing we’ve got to change, Sheldon: when you make a decision, you’ve got to explain the decision. That’s what it means to be a court. That’s what it means to have the rule of law.”
Whitehouse on how Chuck Grassley has changed
After the steak fry program ended, Whitehouse took a couple of minutes to speak to reporters. I asked whether he’s seen any change in how Senator Chuck Grassley conducts himself as chair of the Judiciary Committee, and if so, when he noticed the change.
From Whitehouse’s perspective, a “big change” came during the confirmation process for the “Trump trio” of Supreme Court justices (Neil Gorsuch in 2017, Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, and Amy Coney Barrett in 2020). It was not so much that Grassley changed; “it was the really difficult staff that came in to run those processes in as brutal and partisan a way as they possibly could.”
Whitehouse added, “And it was out of character for Senator Grassley to be that brutal, to be that partisan. But I guess that’s what happens when you’re trying to capture a Supreme Court.”
Asked whether he was alluding to Des Moines native Mike Davis, Whitehouse said, “He’s a very good example, indeed.”
Davis “led the outside support team” for Gorsuch’s confirmation, then was a “warrior” for Kavanaugh as Grassley’s chief counsel for nominations. He left the Senate staff in 2019 to found the Article III Project, a dark money group that “brings brass knuckles to fight leftist lawfare.” Davis has called himself Trump’s “viceroy” and is a frequent guest on TV shows and podcasts in the MAGA world.
Full speech by Sheldon Whitehouse at the Polk County Steak Fry:
Full speech by Representative Jamie Raskin:
You can watch other speeches from the Polk County Steak Fry on the Bleeding Heartland YouTube channel.