Hi friend, I've got some news to share. My new book, The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court, is out today.
After the conservative justices on the Supreme Court shredded precedent to overturn Roe, I was flooded with questions about how the Court had gotten so far off track. Turned out, I’d spent much of the winter working on a book that explains how the Court got captured by big special interests. When we understand what they did, we can understand what we need to do to fix it, before the damage becomes insurmountable. I hope you’ll find the book an illuminating and motivating read.
I've included a description from the publisher below explaining a little more. You can order a copy of The Scheme right here or look for it in a bookstore near you.
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I hope you enjoy it. Thanks, as always, for your commitment to defending our democracy.
Sincerely,
Sheldon
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“One of the most respected and thoughtful progressives in the Senate... A powerful voice in defending our American democracy against the relentless, pervasive—and often hidden—power of corporate special interests.”
— Senator Elizabeth Warren on Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
Following his book Captured on corporate capture of regulatory and government agencies, and his years of experience as a prosecutor, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse here turns his attention to the right-wing scheme to capture the courts, and how it influenced the Trump administration’s appointment of over 230 “business-friendly” judges, including the last three justices of the United States Supreme Court.
Whitehouse traces the motive to control the court system back to Lewis Powell’s notorious memo, which gave a road map for corporate influence to target the judiciary, and chronicles a hidden-money campaign using an armada of front groups and helped by the infamous Citizens United the scheme utilized the Federalist Society as an appointments turnstile, spent secret millions to support the appointees, orchestrated an “amicus brief” signaling apparatus, and propped up front-group litigants to “fast-lane” strategic test cases to the friendly justices.
Whitehouse finds the same small handful of right-wing billionaires and corporations running operations that he likens to “covert ops,” ultimately enticing the Senate to break rules, norms and precedents to confirm wildly inappropriate appointees who would advance the anti-government agenda of a small number of corporate oligarchs.
The world got a glimpse of this story when the senator’s presentation at the Amy Coney Barrett hearing went viral. Now, full of unique insights and inside stories, The Scheme pulls back the curtain on a powerful and hidden apparatus that has spent years trying to corrupt our politics, control our courts and degrade our democracy.
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