Democracy & Destiny Episode 1 with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse

[00:00:00]: This is Democracy and Destiny with Ciara Torres Spelliscy. I have the per curiam opinion and judgment to announce on behalf of the court in Buckley against Valeo. We have a cancer within close to the presidency that's growing. In case 0 8-2 0 5, Citizens United versus the FEC, Justice Kennedy has the opinion of the court.

The First Amendment's core purpose is to foster a vibrant political system full of robust discussion and debate. There is no right more basic in our democracy than the right to participate in electing our political leaders. With fear for our democracy, I, along with Justices Kagan and Jackson Dissent.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Welcome to the show.

I'm Ciara Torres-Spelliscy. I'm a law professor at Stetson Law School in Florida, [00:01:00] and I'm a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. I work on the intersection of election law and corporate law. This show was inspired by my third book, Corporatocracy, How to Protect Democracy From Dark Money and Corrupt Politicians, published by NYU Press election day 2024. I realize in today's busy world reading a 300 page book is not on everyone's to-do list. Even as a law professor, I have time to listen to radio shows and podcasts when I'm commuting to campus or walking my dog. So here we are. This is “Democracy and Destiny.”

Today's episode is about dark money, and I will be joined in a few minutes with my guest, US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who represents the great state of Rhode Island, who will talk about the need for transparency of money and politics. But first, let's start with Pay to Play Today.[00:02:00]

The term pay to play comes from the radio payola scandals from the 1950s and 1960s record companies. Would pay radio stations to play their music, hence it was literally pay to play Today. The phrase pay to play is shorthand for all kinds of political corruption, especially when government contractors or others with business pending in front of the government, pay bribes to public officials to get a private benefit, like a lucrative no bid contract or approval of a corporate merger. One of the things that I learned while writing my book Corporatocracy is that political corruption is prosecuted frequently, but the media doesn't report on it as often as they report on other things like celebrity news. That leaves the misimpression with the public that corrupt politicians or shady government contractors are always getting away with crimes.

So I swore to myself if I ever had a news generating platform that I would [00:03:00] highlight that political corruption can be met with serious legal consequences, including fines and jail time.

Our example of Pay to Play Today is from the DOJ, and I'll call this one “the case of the gold bars.” In 2025, former US Senator Robert Menendez was sentenced to 11 years in prison for bribery for being a foreign agent and for obstruction offenses.

Two New Jersey businessmen who paid bribes were also sentenced to 97 months and seven years in prison. Menendez and two co-defendants were convicted on July 16th, 2024, following a nine week jury trial before Judge Stein who imposed the sentences. US Attorney Danielle Sassoon said, Quote, “the sentences imposed today result from an egregious abuse of power at the highest level of the legislative branch of the federal government.

Robert Menendez was [00:04:00] trusted to represent the United States and the state of New Jersey, but instead, he used his position to help his co-conspirators and a foreign government in exchange for bribes like cash, gold, and a luxury car. The sentences imposed today send a clear message that attempts at any level of government to corrupt the nation's foreign policy and rule of law will be met with just punishment.”

Menendez was a senior US Senator from New Jersey and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee shortly after Menendez began dating his now wife, Nadine Menendez. Nadine introduced Menendez to her longtime friend Hanna, who is originally from Egypt. Hanna lived in New Jersey and maintained close connections with Egyptian officials.

Hanna was also a business associate of Daibes, a New Jersey real estate developer and longtime donor to Menendez and Jose Uribe who worked in New Jersey [00:05:00] in the insurance and trucking business. 18 and 2022. Menendez and Nadine Menendez agreed to and did accept hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bribes, including gold cash, a luxury convertible, payments toward Nadine Menendez home mortgage compensation for a low to no show job for Nadine Menendez home furnishings and other things of value. In June, 2022, the FBI executed a court authorized search warrant at the New Jersey Home of Menendez and Nadine Menendez. During that search, the FBI found many of the fruits of this bribery scheme.

Over $480,000 in cash, much of it stuffed into envelopes and hidden in clothing closets, and a safe was discovered in the home. Some of the envelopes contained the fingerprints of [00:06:00] Menendez or Daibes. Agents also found home furnishings provided by Hanna and Daibes, the luxury vehicle paid for by Uribe parked in the garage, as well as over $100,000 worth of gold bars in the home, which were provided by either Hanna or Daibes.

In exchange for these and other things of value, Menendez agreed and promised to use his power and influence as a senator to seek to protect Hanna's, Uribe’s, and Daibes’s interests and to benefit foreign countries. Through this corrupt relationship, Menendez agreed to take a series of official acts. First Menendez took actions to benefit the government of Egypt and Hanna, including by improperly seeking to pressure an official at the US Department of Agriculture, an attempt to protect a business monopoly granted to Hanna by Egypt. Second, Menendez took action seeking to disrupt a criminal [00:07:00] investigation undertaken by the office of the New Jersey attorney General. Third Menendez recommended that the president nominate a US attorney for the District of New Jersey.

Whom Menendez believed he could influence to disrupt a federal criminal prosecution undertaken by US Attorney's Office for the District of New Jersey. Menendez provided Egyptian officials with non-public information regarding the number and nationality of persons then serving at the US Embassy in Cairo, Hanna and Uribe offered to help buy a new Mercedes-Benz convertible worth more than $60,000. In exchange for Menendez participation in the bribery scheme, Daibes provided Menendez and Nadine Menendez with multiple things in value, including two one kilogram gold bars. In exchange for some of the gold and other things of value from Daibes.

Menendez knew that [00:08:00] Daibes also expected Menendez to take action to benefit the government of Qatar, and thereby benefit Daibes who was seeking millions of dollars in investment from a fund with ties to the government of Qatar.

Our next segment is Corruption Junction. I have been writing about money and politics for two decades. I was inspired to write the book Corporatocracy because of the events of January 6th at the US Capitol. One way to think about this book is it's the Supreme Court's horrible Citizens United decision meets the horrifying events of January 6th, so that we are literally on the same page.

Let me read a short excerpt from Corporatocracy.

[reading from the Preface of Corporatocracy]

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Now we get to the heart of the matter, which is the problem of money and politics. My guest US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has written multiple books, including the scheme, how the Right Wing used Dark Money to capture. The Supreme Court captured the corporate infiltration of American democracy and on virtue quotations and insights to live a full, honorable and truly American life.

I'm so glad to have you here today to speak about the state of American democracy. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here. I am just over the moon that you were willing to do this.

[00:19:42] Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: Oh, totally. Happy to.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: When I explain dark money on my book tour for Corporatocracy, I often say you need either litigation or a leak to get to the bottom of the source of dark money. [00:19:55] But people can mean really different things by the phrase dark money. So what [00:20:00] is your definition of dark money Senator?

[00:20:02] Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: Mine is amounts of money significant enough to make a political difference in an election whose true source is hidden from voters.

[00:20:14] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: A few years ago, I had never heard of certain, now infamous billionaires, but reporting by a ProPublica changed that though I was noticing in your book the scheme which came out before the ProPublica reports that you had actually identified some of the issues that are now infamous. What is the Supreme Court Dark money problem?

[00:20:36] Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: The Supreme Court dark money problem is twofold. They're both the product of dark money and the source or producer of dark money. They're the product of dark money in the sense that probably at least 20 years ago.

A very thoughtful, [00:21:00] covert operation was set up. With the intention to capture the Supreme Court, and when I say capture, I use that term in the sense that it's used in the field of administrative law and economics. With the traditional example being, say, mining barons who took over the Mine Safety Commission or railroad barons who took over the.

Commission that set railroad rates and now they had a friendly body that would do the wishes of those it was supposed to regulate. It was under more or less secret control, uh, by special interests. And that is really what has become of the court. It took a lot of work to get there. People like Lisa Graves have done impressive research that digs out that the spending on this is probably north of $700 million, but.

If you can have a court that will reliably give you important decisions that you want, that can save you money in the billions, then spending $700 [00:22:00] million over a period of, uh, many years is a very worthwhile investment. If you had to put a start date on it. One would be the Powell memo going to the Chamber of Commerce immediately before, lawyer Powell became Justice Powell in the Nixon administration.

And the second would be when President Bush tried to put his friend and White House counsel. Harriet Miers on the court replacing Sandra Day O'Connor and the right wing billionaires in the far right erupted and forced him to, forced a Republican president to humiliatingly, have to withdraw his own nominee in favor of a billionaire approved nominee who was Sam Alito.

That was the moment I think that launched Leonard Leo, who became the court fixer par excellence. So you have this billionaire funded operation very carefully done. If you, if you were paying attention, [00:23:00] you could see it, but it was nominally a covert. Much of it was covert. And then of course, it was the Supreme Court that created dark money when it refused to enforce.

Its. Citizens United decision, which had as the legal predicate for allowing unlimited amounts of money into politics, that the money was all gonna be transparent, that the voters would know who was behind the so-called speech. And of course, that was instantly proven false by the arrival of billions of dollars in dark money.

And when John McCain and I pointed that out to the court, they just shrugged and didn't care. And so they signed off in that sense on. The unlimited money that they authorized instead, united being also dark money. So transparency and anonymity are often duking it out at the Supreme Court when it comes to political spending.

Do you think the Supreme Court was correct in Buckley versus Valeo to provide for a harassment exception to campaign finance disclosure? [00:24:00] That's a tough call. I do think that a bit of history first. This has its roots in an old decision called N-A-A-C-P versus Alabama, in which the state of Alabama sought the membership list of the N-A-A-C-P at a time when Jim Crow was still going.

Lynchings were happening. There was considerable violence against civil rights activists, and there was a very credible danger to people who were on the NACP membership list. Now, the operatives of the creepy billionaires who are basically trying to run our government from behind the scenes through floods of [money].

Think that they're the modern day equivalent of an N-A-A-C-P member. So the NACP membership list wasn't donors, it was just a membership list.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Let's take a short break and we're back.[00:25:00]

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: And these were people who had, I think, genuine fears and appropriate fears, either directly by the state of Alabama and its law enforcement enterprises or through private organizations that would take this information and then come and threaten them and them violence. A shell corporation. Hiding behind a front group, hiding behind a super PAC is a completely different animal in the political spectrum.

And so I think there's been a very erroneous conflation of those two things. Kind of go with Scalia's judgment on this, which is if you wanna [00:26:00] join in the public debate, and particularly if you wanna influence it and potentially use that influence against. Interest of other people. You, you should own up to that.

You should be willing to stand up on the rostrum in the public square and say your piece and not have it hidden from, the public who you really are, among other things that takes away the ability of voters and citizens to understand motive and understand why a message might be a pack of lies that might not be apparent if you don't know who's.

The message, so there is some real danger of harassment Going back to the NAACP case. But in the case of, of creepy billionaires trying to manipulate government from behind the scenes, I just think it's a completely different scenario.

[00:26:50] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: One example that I give my students of how dangerous it was to be an NAACP member, uh.

Comes from my neck of the woods here in Florida. [00:27:00] There was a member of the NAACP named Harry T. Moore, who died in a Christmas day bombing at his house. People say it was dangerous to be known as a member. It was. It could be deadly back then. Many people blame Citizens United for Dark Money or use Citizens United as an excuse for why spending dark money in politics is allowed, like now convicted felons, Sam Bankman-Fried and Larry Householder.

So do you blame Citizens United for dark money? [00:27:32]

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: I do, and I blame the court. That issued Citizens United more than, I blame the decision itself because if you actually read the decision itself, it is predicated upon a factual determination that all of the money that would be spent by these big donors who now have the ability to flood politics with money would be transparent.

IE voters would know who they were. [00:28:00] First sin of Citizens United was its direct sin, which was to allow unlimited corporate and special interest money into politics. The worst sin was its indirect sin, and that is in the court, allowing the Citizens United premise that this would all be transparent, to be flagrantly violated, and to never be willing to go back and either reconsider the decision or out.

Reinforce that when they said transparency, they meant transparency. And now we're up to what? $2 billion in dark money in the last election. And every single one of those dollars is a rebuke to the Supreme Court for failing to enforce its own judgment in Citizens United and therefore allowing dark money to flood.

Election.

[00:28:49]

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: I think the average American would, would be surprised that the Supreme Court has upheld disclosure of money in politics for 49 years Now, does it matter that the Supreme Court has [00:29:00] upheld disclosure of money in politics in Buckley, in Citizens United itself and in McCutchen?

[00:29:08] Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: Well, yes and no.

Yes, it matters because that's been the, uh, tradition and it's kind of solid baseline democratic. Principle that you don't want elections bought secretly by big, powerful, special interests. That shouldn't be a controversial notion. The problem comes when it's actually. You know, game day and the dark money people show up.

And the question then is, what does the Supreme Court do about it? And there are some very bad signals out there. One is refusing to reconsider the question of transparency in the Montana case [American Tradition Partnership] that followed Citizens United and as to whether a state could regulate corporate spending, even if. [00:30:00] Supreme Court found that the federal government and Congress couldn't, and I wrote a brief with John McCain pointing out the problem that this transparency predicate was completely violated.

Decisions stood on a false premise and indisputably false premise, and they needed to take a second look and they just blew us off. The second was the Americans for Prosperity versus uh, Bonta Decision, which was a recent one. One that was really riddled with special interest, dark money mischief. It was actually Americans for Prosperity Foundation.

I should use the whole proper name versus Banta. And Americans for Prosperity Foundation accepted money from donors and as a California organization, it had to report to the state of California who its donors were so that California could look at the tax deductible donations going to this group and making sure it wasn't.

Crooked self-dealing that it was, you know, honest actual [00:31:00] work. And they do that with all their charitable organizations and that was challenged by them through the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court in a partisan decision said that there was a right to secrecy that was greater than the right of the state of California to defend against fraud.

And. They never mentioned the transparency issues of Citizens United. They acted as if that just didn't exist. But the connection is that Americans for Prosperity Foundation is the 5 0 1 C3 sibling of Americans for Prosperity, which is the Koch brothers big political battleship. The Koch brothers run an armada of front groups, but the central battleship of that Armada is Americans for Prosperity and Americans for Prosperity Foundation shares, you know, office space.

Most of its name, uh, donors, board members, [00:32:00] staff. Other, there's the screen between the two is really nominal and so anybody know who knew what was going on, could see this is a ginormous political battleship trying to get dark money into its sibling where there's very, very little corporate veil, uh, between the two.

And nobody's gonna look at that corporate veil very well either. So it's a back door for money into politics. And if that wasn't proven just by the scenario, then the fact that 50 50 dark money front groups showed up to file amicus briefs in favor of Americans for Prosperity Foundation at the cert. stage before even argument.

So it was a huge signal, like a fireworks display in the sky to the justices of the Supreme Court. That they had helped get onto the court. Hey dudes, [00:33:00] this is a big one for us. Make sure you decide it our way. And of course they did. As you alluded to, a recent study of the 2024 election put out by the Brennan Center, found that there was $1.9 billion in dark money in the 2024 election alone.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Why should that concern the average voter?

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: The extent of dark money in the last election should concern the average voter because it has been true forever. As some political operative said in the twenties, I think it was, that money is the mother's milk. Of politics and if big special interest with huge stakes in government decisions are able to secretly spend that kind of money in elections, then that [00:34:00] will cause the elected officials, the members of Congress, to swivel their attention towards that mother's milk and they will pay undue attention to the forces behind.

Money I should have added in my definition of dark money, that it's not dark as between the big donor and the candidate and the party leadership. Everybody in that circle gets the joke. There's no point spending $20 million in an election and having the candidate not know it was you. That information is, I think, in every case, communicated and and known.

It's just the public that doesn't know because it's never publicly disclosed. But what the public does see is a political class that is no longer paying attention to them in the same way, it's like the political class has a new [00:35:00] girlfriend. It's the one with the billions of dollars to give away. And I think regular voters feel that and feel slighted as they felt the attention of the political class pivot away from regular voters and onto this massive, massive, massive new source of campaign funding.

[00:35:22] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Why should it potentially concern the average shareholder that there's so much dark money in politics?

[00:35:30] Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: Well,

there are a couple of reasons. First of all, if you're a shareholder in a business that is not actively involved in dark money and might actually be a economic rival to that industry, let's say for instance, you're a shareholder in a clean energy company and fossil fuel is spending tens of billions of dollars in elections, and you want a fair playing field for your clean energy product against their polluting.

Product and you can't [00:36:00] get that for your business because the fossil fuel guys have their snout into the political trough of the Republican party in Congress, and there's just no room for you. So it could, it can really damage your business interests when a competitor has the unfair advantage of being a big.

Dark money donor. The other thing is, if you're in the position of being a shareholder in a company that is a dark money donor, you have your own internal corporate democracy in which you are supposed to be making the decisions about what the company does and the managers of these big, dark money spenders.

Tend to avoid sharing that information with shareholders. 'cause if you share it with shareholders, you share it with the world essentially. And now it's not dark money any longer and everybody gets what your motive was. And you can be held accountable for awful and false things you may have said. So it becomes a mess.

So [00:37:00] shareholders are actually, in some cases the victims of the secrecy. As shareholders and not just as competitors with the big dark money players.

[00:37:13] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: When I worked for Senator Robb in the 1990s, one of the reasons that was a challenging job was Oliver North used to get on his radio show and tell some outrageous lie, and that our switchboard would just light up like a Christmas tree.

So is disinformation a worse problem now or is it just the medium that has changed?

[00:37:34] Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: No. Disinformation is a worse problem now. When the fairness doctrine fell or was knocked out, that allowed major platforms on tv, on cable to turn themselves into political advocates to be propagandize for one party or, uh, another.

And whether it was talk radio or Fox [00:38:00] News or the more extreme, uh, channels that are out there, it's set loose an entirely different sense of what the responsibility is of, uh, the media. And once you start down that road, it's not long before you're not telling the truth any longer. If your goal is to propagandize for one set of political beliefs, then your goal is to be successful at that.

And if a lie will help you be successful, then your obligation as you see it, will be to tell the lie to achieve your highest purpose, which is to support the political faction, uh, whose propaganda you're distributing. Then of course the, the internet makes it all just even wilder. And the attraction of, you know, clickbait, even if it's totally false.

And the successful political scheme of keeping people riled up with [00:39:00] outrages that are manufactured, uh, to get them riled up. That whole ecosystem is what produces the slime. But I would add one component of. Is slimy and false TV ads that are run in elections. And I think that has a lot to do with dark money because if at the end of the ad that slimed and lied and was foul at the, if at the end of the ad you had to say, well, we're ExxonMobil and we approved this message, then there's some real ownership of it and it's harder to just tell that lie.

If it's a phony front group, that's the only name on it. The phony front group, like a used Kleenex. After you've, uh, put your foul ness outrow it, then there's nobody at the end of the day, nobody real at the end of the day, who's accountable for the message. Hence the, uh, torrent, what one writer called the tsunami of slime that came into [00:40:00] politics after Citizens United.

[00:40:03] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: One of the things I cover in my book was the three quarters of a billion dollar settlement between Fox and Dominion. But if you watch Fox News that night, Fox didn't cover it. Fox viewers wouldn't know about it. So why are information silos a problem for American democracy?

[00:40:21] Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: Well, same reason that propagandas a problem in most societies.

It's the reason that, you know, in North Korea. All the state media Propagandized 24 7. For the Dear leader, it's the reason that in Putin's crooked Russia, all of the media outlets propagandized relentlessly for Vladimir Putin. It becomes a tool of political power over people rather than a means for information empowering people.

And it's a very, very. Dangerous [00:41:00] road, once a so-called news outlet begins to become a political propaganda outlet. It just changes the entire approach. And obviously people are disserved and if you look at the societies in which that has gone really critical, really bad, they're not societies that you want to live in.

[00:41:25] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: What is the value of Stare decisis, which is the Latin term for respect for precedent in this Supreme Court after Dobbs overruled Roe v. Wade?

[00:41:34] Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: Well, the value of Stare Decisis is mostly reliance that people and, businesses and organizations can organize their affairs around a stable understanding of the law.

And have some confidence that it's gonna continue to be that way. Now it's possible for there to be wrong decisions. So stare decisis can't be absolute, [00:42:00] but it is a very valuable and important characteristic in the law. And it's one that the right wing Koch brothers justices all pay a lot of lip service too, particularly in their nominations hearings.

But then when it comes again to game day and it's time to undo women's rights to choose about their own procreation, then it goes right out the window, went out, right out the window. In, Citizens United, somebody could probably do a very good academic paper studying the extent to which right wing interests were pursuing a matter at the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court was willing to break from stare decisis and make new law. My informal view is that that's a, it's a, it's a big signal that stare decisis is [00:43:00] almost always used to accommodate the right wing interest that put these judges justices on the court. And there is this weird overlap, which I think you can trace to Jim Bop, that often the plaintiffs who are challenging good campaign finance regulations are right to life groups.

[00:43:20] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Do you have any predictions for the fate of the SAVE act?

[00:43:24] Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: I think it's gonna have trouble in that. I don't think it passes reconciliation scrutiny. I'm now into technical senate jargon. Reconciliation is essentially the budget bill, what people are now calling the, uh, big, beautiful for billionaires bill, which can get through the Senate without cloture, with a simple majority with no filibuster.

When you have a situation like you have right now with a trifecta house, senate, and White House all occupied by the same party, they have an incentive [00:44:00] to shove a bill through and not have to deal with the minority party. In the Senate and that's what they're doing right now. That's what this whole big, beautiful, for billionaires Bill is.

And, but there are rules about what you can fit into that bill, and I think the Save Act is a complete failure in terms of being something that you can fit into that bill. Uh, unfortunately the Senate rules were just blown up by the Republicans when there was another very obvious violation of. Senate rules and they overruled the parliamentarian and shoved the matter through for the fossil fuel industry, which was putting an end to the California vehicle emission standard.

So they're fresh off of having, um, overruled the parliamentarian and when the reconciliation bill comes over and we make a point of order that the save act is not, uh, in order. Because it is not qualifying under reconciliation rules [00:45:00] because it's not primarily, uh, economic and fiscal, then they have the ability to just flip the script, call a vote, overrule a parliamentarian, and bingo.

It's in the fate of the save bill. Really depends on the appetite of the Republicans to continue to overrule a parliamentarian in order to shove. Unpopular measures that have not been negotiated with the minority through the Senate.

[00:45:27] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: What legislation have you introduced to fix these problems?

[00:45:31] Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: Well, the big one is the Disclose Act, which basically says, Hey, if you're spending more than 10 grand in a particular election, people ought to know who you are and you can't hide behind layers of shells and corporate shields and Super pacs and all of that.

If we passed that A, that would be the end to dark money of any consequence, because $10,000 is, you [00:46:00] know, a pretty, pretty big sum, but nothing compared to the $10 million that certain interests are spending. And second, I think it would dramatically reduce the amount of special interest spending because special interest spending is no longer as effective at.

Once the voter knows who's doing the spending, I think there's less of this special interest money corrupting our politics. And then finally, I think the messages have to be less vile and less false because once you have an actual entity or an actual individual whose name is on the ad, they now have some ownership of what is said and can be held.

Accountable in the public sphere for lying. Whereas if it comes through like some phony front group with a name like Rhode Islanders for peace and puppies and prosperity, like who's to blame when they say [00:47:00] something that's false and horrible? Nobody, they are not even a real group to blame, evaporates into the secrecy.

So for all three reasons, I think the disclose act is the key. Better information to voters, less slime. In the political environment and reduced clout of big special interest vis-a-vis regular voters.

[00:47:21] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: So I see we're at time. Can I sneak in one more question?

[00:47:24] Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: Sure.

[00:47:25] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: how do you keep yourself sane in these trying times?

[00:47:30] Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: Well, you know, one thing that has been sort of fortunate for us in my office is that we've been after these creepy billionaires and their dark money operations. For, you know, over a decade we've been after them in their climate denial fraud operations. We've been after them as the, uh, dark money operatives.

We've been after them as [00:48:00] the people behind the court capture. And so there's, you know, we've been basically at battle stations for a long time now, and as I said, when Trump was elected, hey, same battleship. Worse weather, we'll just sail on. And so that's what we've been doing. But my office was very toughened up for a battle like this because we had been fighting for so long, very often alone on the subjects and taking all the creepy incoming from the creepy billionaires.

You know, the 30 plus Wall Street Journal, hostile editorials, the threats, the fake ethics accusations, the internet abuse. The whole operation we've now seen for a long time. It's not news to us how these people operate. What's news is they have Trump out in front being their showman, and, but the game is the same and we've been ready for it for a long time.

[00:49:00] So we haven't had to go through the same kind of anxious rebooting that other offices, had to do.

[00:49:08] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Well, Senator Whitehouse, I wanted to let you know my mom grew up in Providence and my dad is a graduate of risd. The good people of Rhode Island are lucky to have you working on their behalf. So thank you so much for being here.

[00:49:21] Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: Thanks so much for having me on, and thank you for your wonderful book.

[00:49:24] Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: Okay, thank you. Have a great day.

Let's take a short break. We're back.

As someone who spends her time focused on political corruption, it is easy to end up with a dim view of humanity and to get dispirited about everything. But one of the things that has kept me happy and sane over the past eight years is my 100 pound chocolate Labradoodle.

So with your [00:50:00] indulgence and to lighten the mood, let me share my life motto with you, which is Loves dogs hates corruption. My Labradoodle nickname is TR, which is short for Teddy Roosevelt. The reason he has this nickname is my dog loves to snack, especially on human food. Usually if the humans in my house are having a snack, my dog will get right up next to you and demand his fair share.

There's a story about the real president Teddy Roosevelt told by industrialist, and steel baron Henry Clay Frick, who complained about Teddy Roosevelt, who Frick had supported with campaign money. Frick said, quote, “we bought that SOB, but he didn't stay bought.” End quote. Instead, president Teddy Roosevelt went on to be a trust buster who took on the power of monopoly among the robber barons of his day.

So in my house, if you give my doodle a snack. [00:51:00] Then you continue to eat your own food, he will ask for more. So we often tell our dog, oh, we already paid you TR, and our dog's response is indignity. And his staring at us indicates the equivalent of, you cannot buy my good behavior with your petty gifts.

That is how my doodle got the nickname TR. Okay, now back to business.

Now we get to our final segment. The fix is in Many of the problems with our democracy seem unfixable, but that is not true. These problems were created by human beings, and they can be solved by human beings. We can improve laws and practices at the local, state, and federal level, and the first step is realizing that these are [00:52:00] not unsolvable problems.

We can fix it. Today, we talked about dark money in federal elections and dark money surrounding the Supreme Court. The dark money surrounding the Supreme Court is a problem that the Supreme Court needs to fix itself. It needs an enforceable code of ethics. After ProPublica did its exposes on the lavish vacations and other gifts from billionaires to sitting justices, the court put out a non-binding ethics code.

This is not good enough. What would be better would be. No gifts rule with consequences for justices. After all, the justices of the Supreme Court are civil servants, they should be able to live on their federal salary, and Congress has a role here too. If the justices really cannot afford the cost of living in the DC metro area, then the solution to that problem is to raise their base salary.

That is a far better solution than Justices getting money from people who have cases or interests pending before the Supreme Court. Also, [00:53:00] Congress has the power of impeachment. They should hold justices accountable. Just remember that democracy is worth defending. And that a little truth goes a long way.

[Credits]

Thank you to my guests for joining me today. This is a production of Ciara Torres Spelliscy who can be found on social media as @ProfCiara, P-R-O-F-C-I-A-R-A. The episode was mixed by WBAI. Our logo is by Entire World. Theme Music was composed and performed by Matt Bowler. This show is based on the book Corporatocracy, published by NYU Press.

This has been “Democracy and Destiny with Ciara Torres-Spelliscy.”