Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett isn’t going to answer any of the big questions truthfully, and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse knew that. So instead of inviting Barrett to be dishonest, Whitehouse explained the forces that put her in that Senate hearing room with the specific agenda—killing the Affordable Care Act, ending marriage equality, overturning Roe v. Wade—she is on the record as having (but is currently pretending not to have).
Whitehouse described the Senate hearing room as being like a puppet theater, with “forces outside of this room who are pulling strings and pushing sticks and causing the puppet theater to react.” Highlighting the hypocrisy from Senate Republicans who claimed in 2016 that they would oppose filling a Supreme Court seat in 2020 only to push to do exactly that after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Whitehouse said “When you find hypocrisy in the daylight, look for power in the shadows.” He then spent his time shining a light on the power in the shadows—the right-wing dark money behind the Republican takeover of the courts and the use of the courts to move U.S. policy ever to the right.
