For your early morning reading pleasure, I give you Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s 4,568th (approximately) unhinged rant about climate change and how evil conservatives are destroying, oh, everything. I saw this dog’s breakfast “liked” and “loved” on Facebook by smart people who should know better, and am hoping against hope they didn’t actually read the thing.
Whitehouse is Little Rhodey’s senior U.S. Senator, Democrat of course, and his speech this week on the Senate floor (several members had to be hospitalized after they rolled their eyes too hard) was reflexively praised by “The Nation,” which employs far, far, FAR left lunatic Elie Mystal as an editor.
[Digression: You remember Elie, don’t you? He can only appear in public now on MSNBC without being chased by men in white coats carrying butterfly nets. He was too extreme for the left-biased legal gossip rag “Above the Law,” which published his radical nonsense before he went completely bonkers. Elie has opined that all black jurors should always vote to acquit black defendants no matter hwo guilty they are. Nice. (I wonder what the ABA would say if juries paid any attention to him?) More recently he called for foreign nations to issue sanctions against the U.S.]
Read it. Or at least try. I dare you. I double dare you. First, it is garbled, rambling and incoherent (not unlike this), perhaps not quite Authentic Frontier Gibberish, but too close to be tolerated from a U.S. Senator. Second, and this has always been true of his rants, Whiethouse obviously doesn’t understand climate change science at all, like all hysterics who want the U.S. to spend trillions and cripple the economy based on speculation. This country can’t slow down climate change, whatever it is, without the vast majority of the world joining in and they won’t, don’t and can’t. This includes giant countries India and China. Does Whitehouse really not comprehend this, or is he just pimping for a world dictatorship? Oh, who knows? There is no justification for paying any attention to him, ever.
Whitehouse has, for example, repeatedly said that Americans who oppose the climate change “consensus” should be imprisoned. To this, law professor/pundit Glenn Reynolds responded,
“First, this man should be voted out of office as soon as human possible. His ignorance is dangerous. Second, the state bar should require him to undergo at least 100 hours of mandatory continuing legal education on the subject of constitutional law, with emphasis on the First Amendment. Newsflash: joining together to discuss common interests and even–gasp!–funding research, white papers and lobbying efforts to advance one’s perspectives on an issue isn’t illegal; its free speech.”
It should be no surprise that Whitehouse implies that the Texas flood is the result of evil Republicans and Donald Trump not caring about our planet slowly burning up, though there is no evidence of the tragedy being caused by climate change (or DOGE cuts). [Added] I just saw this…
Awwww. Too BAD, Senator!
But he has other villains to finger: “dark money” that elects those evil Republicans (funny, getting far more money in donations than Donald Trump didn’t seem to help Kamala Harris any); “creepy billionaires,” and a “captured Supreme Court.” In fact, I can’t let this pass; here is that part of the rant:
A captured Supreme Court puts an entire branch of government under hidden political control, with no electoral remedy to its bad decisions, thanks to lifetime appointments of the captured justices. Capture of our Supreme Court has caused lasting damage already, deforming our constitutional order. The same interests always winning is observable, as is the statistical improbability of that, and it degrades faith in the Court. Capture rots the Court from within; a billionaire gifts program, to reward the most amenable justices with ‘lifestyles of the rich and famous,’ twisted the Court into knots as it tried to prevent facts from coming out (even potential tax cheating), and to defeat any real ethics code. That’s all a devilish and rotten business, in a great republic…
Which brings us to the captured Court; The Court That Dark Money Built. Freeing the Supreme Court from its captured state will not be easy. Too many justices are willing participants in the capture scheme. If the Supreme Court justices wanted to redeem their Court, they could have done it already. They could do it on their own, at any time. But captured is as captured does. They don’t want to.
It matters on climate. A rejuvenated Court would take the evidence of climate harm seriously. Over and over, The Court That Dark Money Built has favored fossil fuel interests. It threw out the Clean Power Plan, saving industry tens of billions in compliance costs and allowing more than a dozen years of continued pollution. If the $700 billion fossil fuel subsidy number is close to right, and if the Clean Power Plan would have only shaved 10% off the harm, that one decision alone cost Americans nearly $1 trillion in pollution harms. That’s worth capturing the Court for if you’re the fossil fuel industry.
The Court created the “major questions” doctrine to give the fossil fuel industry a legal weapon to stop future climate regulations. The Court withdrew the Chevron doctrine, taking away from experts in the regulatory process the benefit of the doubt. In all these cases, the fossil fuel industry got free legal services from Republican attorneys general, undoubtedly grateful for their fossil fuel political funding. What a rotten misuse of that badge of office.
To reform the Court, Congress will have to act on two fronts. One is to require a proper ethics code for the Court, including the essential elements of proper legal process, actual fact-finding and neutral decision-making, not complicated stuff. Rule of law is based on those two practices. The justices shield themselves from both.
The present Court and its political defenders pretend that fixing this is impossible, but it’s not. Every state supreme court faces the issue of administering a proper ethics code for itself, and every single one has figured it out. Forget impossible, it’s not even hard.
The problem is that the justices (or certain of them) enjoy being the only nine people in government immune from proper ethics scrutiny. Look at the billionaire gifts program and you might see why. They violate an ancient principle, so ancient it’s in Latin: nemo judex in sua causa. No one should judge their own case. As an ethics scholar recently put it, it’s a conflict of interest to judge one’s own conflict of interest.
The public is ready for more than just real ethics, however. The present Court’s legacy — of scandals, destruction of precedent, doctrinal leaps, false fact-finding in cases, and striking patterns in what interests always win — is damning. Add the unhealthy secrets — around who chose justices and why, and around the billionaires’ campaign of gifts to amenable justices, and around tax mischief related to those gifts — and it’s a mess. The public is ready for term limits, and turnover.
A Court rejuvenated with regular turnover, with its secrets disclosed and a proper ethics procedure going forward, is a Court that can again merit the confidence of the American people, and perform the judicial function honorably.
Imagine, a Democrat arguing that it’s the conservative Justices who aren’t sufficiently “neutral”: has he read the bonkers dissents coming from the DEI wing of SCOTUS lately? Like the proverbial stopped clock, Whitehouse is right about Clarence Thomas, who should, as I have said before, resign in shame. But to be lectured on “real ethics” by Sheldon Whitehouse is as infuriating as being lectured by Thomas. Here’s his EA dossier, and I stopped posting on him for the most part because he’s a certified Ethics Dunce. The Senate has ethics rules, but they didn’t stop Whitehouse from pulling this, for example.
The fact that Senator Whitehouse is a fool, a grandstanding hypocrite, and a lurking totalitarian makes him an unreliable messenger even if he were screaming that the sky is blue, but even if he had impeccable credentials, his message would expose him as a blight on intelligent discourse. We really elect these people. With that, I have to close, once again, with the tuneful duet from “Li’l Abner”:
Ethics Alarms 
That Gish Gallop on the Supreme Court is a doozy! The amount of misinformation, lies, and distortions would take a lifetime to unravel. I quake at the thought of reading the rest.
Like with so many other left-wing cons, the climate change issue is being revealed for what it really is: an effort to impose left-wing control over every aspect of society. The veil is coming off, and people are realizing that, after the 300th “We have only 5 years to save the planet” failed prediction, maybe there isn’t any real substance to all the anthropogenic global warming hype. We’ve endured a long pause in warming; sea levels continue to rise at about the pace they have for the past 150 years; storms, floods, and droughts are no more frequent or severe; the globe is greening; food production continues to surpass global needs (distribution is a different problem); the drop in cold-related deaths by far outpaces the rise in heat-related deaths (though very thankfully due to air conditioning); and all the while our global emissions continue to rise unabated despite everything the West has done to cut emissions.
The lies can only be maintained for so long before people start to realize that reality is not matching what they’ve been told. It doesn’t help that there is blatant hypocrisy among the elite who are pushing the climate change agenda. Flying around the globe in private jets, owning enormous mansions, lectures on how we need to dramatically change our lifestyles, but never curtailing their own – at some point, we have to ask if the elites truly believe their own drivel. Again, if we were serious about carbon dioxide (which is plant food, by the way, and why the world is greening as CO2 levels rise globally), we would be pushing for nuclear power, with its enormous generation potential and small footprint, instead of acres of solar panels and wind turbines that are ultimately just as, or more, harmful to the environment that coal-fired plants.
However, the real question is why Rhode Islanders like Sen. Whitehouse so much. Congress as a whole polls very low, but politicians usually poll quite well among their constituents. I would have to dig into his work on infrastructure, healthcare, and transparency, but apparently whatever he is doing continues to convince the people of Rhode Island to send him back to Congress. I don’t know anything about Rep. Patricia Morgan who was his challenger in this past election, but he beat her by a 20-point margin, whereas Harris only beat Trump by a 14-point margin. I think that suggests he’s relatively popular with Rhode Islanders, and not just the best of a really bad set of options (in their eyes).
That CNN video made me laugh. Does he not think tornadoes, hurricanes, storms, etc. have been going on since the dawn of time? Aren’t violent weather events how we got mountains and islands thousands of years ago? The reason people are not afraid of climate change is for some of the following reasons:
There are so many more reasons, but no one can take these folks seriously when they sabotage their own message year after year while slowly imposing draconian measures on the public while the worst polluters get a free pass. Uncle Bob on a ventilator has to worry about how brown outs will affect his ability to breathe but Big Tech can just keep using all the water it wants. No one cares because in reality, these so-called activists don’t either.
“No one cares because in reality, these so-called activists don’t either.”
I am concerned by climate scientists becoming climate activists, because scholars should not have a priori interests in the outcome of their studies. Likewise, I am worried about activists who pretend to be scientists, as this can be a misleading form of instrumentalization. Ulf Büntgen
PWS
Mrs. Q asked: “That CNN video made me laugh. Does he not think tornadoes, hurricanes, storms, etc. have been going on since the dawn of time?”
The only thing that makes sense to me is that he doesn’t realize people have longer memories than, say my pooch, Lord Remington Winchester Burger, I, Esq., Dog of Letters, who seems to think that every time I leave a room, I might never come back, and when i do, he doesn’t seem to remember I was just there 2 minutes ago.
jvb
This scientist Proved Climate Change Isn’t Causing Extreme Weather — So Politicians Attacked
MONEY QUOTE: Many Scientists Who Have The Facts And Know The Truth Remain Silent
PWS
Profiles In Climate Hypocrisy: The Snail Darter
In 1979, a dam (the Tellico) on the Little Tennessee River was 95 % completed when that little bugger was found to be in the way.
The Tellico Dam wasn’t needed for power generation or flood control. Turns out it was a sop to cement contractors who needed pandering, something which was cheerfully, if cravenly, supplied by an up-n-coming Volunteer State politician.
Thus, the newly minted Endangered Species Act (ESA) was presented with its first challenge.
A “God Squad” was created, which would issue waivers based on the cost/benefit analysis of completing projects where ESA listed species had the poor judgement of holing up in the wrong place…that is…in the way of “progress.”
Whether “settled science” was consulted is unknown, but not really the point.
Whom some call America’s greatest environmentalist, David Brower: ”This was the beginning of the end of the Endangered Species Act.”
Now, who was that Mother Gaia ravagin’/God’s Creatures Murderin’/ESA destroyin’ up-n-comer?
The name Al Gore, Jr. ring a bell?
A (IMO) good read, and necessarily brutal treatise, on Gore is offered by Jeffery St. Clair (no Righty, he!) of Counterpunch.org (The Fearless Voice Of The American Left Since 1993) “Al Gore: The Origins Of A Hypocrite.”
PWS