Friend,

Dark-money special interests have captured the Supreme Court.

The last few weeks have really brought it home as the right-wing Court trampled precedent to deliver unpopular outcomes that Republican donor interests have been after for years. The result is a rapid reshaping of American life in ways that the American people don't want – outlawing abortion in many places, rolling back basic gun safety protections and taking away tools to fight climate change.

This outcome has been decades in the making. And it didn't come cheap. Special interests have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to remake the Supreme Court. That money helped shepherd three new justices onto the Court under President Trump, creating a newly emboldened right-wing supermajority that wasted no time in its first term.

This secretly-funded operation has turned the Supreme Court into the judicial arm of right-wing donor interests. Their handiwork is all over the recent decisions to overturn Roe v. Wade and to expand the ability to carry concealed weapons. It's all over the decision in West Virginia v. EPA, which according to the New York Times is "the product of a coordinated, multi-year strategy by Republican attorneys general, conservative legal activists and their funders, several with ties to the oil and coal industries, to use the judicial system to rewrite environmental law."

For those of us fighting to keep the Supreme Court independent and nonpartisan, we're up against powerful interests, but we can't give up. Democrats are fighting back. We've gone around the Supreme Court to pass the most important gun safety reforms in decades. I'm leading the charge to expose the money spent in judicial confirmation fights and to reform Supreme Court ethics rules so that justices follow the same disclosure requirements as officials in the other branches of the federal government. 

We're making the special interests nervous, friend. They know we're onto their scheme and fighting to take our government back, but this work will be a lot harder if Mitch McConnell regains control of the Senate in November. I'm counting on your support to defend our Democratic majority and keep up this essential work.

I don't accept a dime from corporate PACs, so I'm counting on you today: Will you make a donation of $5 or more to my campaign now to help me take on the special interests and defend Democrats' razor-thin Senate majority?

Thank you for reading,

Sheldon Whitehouse