Nomination of Amy Coney Barrett

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, good morning to you. You stand watches everywhere.

We are here, in part, because of a Supreme Court nomination, but we are here also because of a Supreme Court process that has turned foul in a considerable number of ways.

I would like to spend the time that I have with you this morning walking through some of the history that got us there.

With respect to the now-standard Republican talking points that the only reason that we are here today in this partisan wrangle is because of Harry Reid, I would submit that the spectacle of procedural wreckage that surrounds all three of the last Supreme Court nominees completely belies any suggestion that Senator McConnell would have respected the filibuster of a Supreme Court Justice. They have broken essentially every rule that got in their way--it didn't matter what it was--over and over again. And the idea that they would break every rule but that one simply makes no sense.

So I can see that it is sort of a cute and clever argument to go back and point out that Harry Reid broke the effort to stonewall all of President Obama's appointees to the DC Circuit Court, which was what was going on at the time, but the rest of the wreckage belies that this would have been protected by Leader McConnell in the mad, headlong rush to load up the Supreme Court with nominees who have been through this very, very peculiar Supreme Court process.

To those who wonder why it is that we talk a lot about healthcare in the context of this nominee, look no further than the Republican Party platform that my colleagues supported, which says that Republican Presidents will appoint judges to reverse the ObamaCare cases. That is the language from their own party platform. So expect some skepticism about the sincerity of Republican expressions that they are shocked-- shocked--that we would try to tie the fate of the Affordable Care Act to this nominee when they have put that in their party platform.

One of the unpleasant aspects of the process that I am about to describe has been that the handoff to special interests of control over who gets appointed to the Supreme Court means that there is an audience for auditioning. Over and over again, we have seen judges audition to that audience in order to get onto that all-important Federalist Society list or, in the case of Judge Kavanaugh, to get escorted by Leonard Leo, the operative of that operation, right around the list and onto its very top. Nobody auditioned like Brett Kavanaugh.

But Judge Barrett made her own effort, and that was to make it very publicly clear that she disagreed with Justice Roberts, the swing vote who protected ObamaCare. That mattered because the outrage in the rightwing that their Supreme Court they thought they had claimed actually made one decision against their political interests--a sense of betrayal by Justice Roberts. That was very acute.

It was into that environment that Judge Barrett added her unsolicited opinion--just threw it out there--that Roberts was wrong; that the dissent had it right. Obviously that allows us--in fact, requires us-- to draw the logical conclusion that when she is the swing vote, she is going to go with the minority. So she telegraphed how she would rule in this matter. She became the nominee. It was on the Republican Party platform that she should reverse the ObamaCare cases. How are we not supposed to notice this when you say this in all caps?

So, please, let's not pretend that we are making up a connection between this appointment and the persistent Republican attack on our present healthcare system.

The first thing you have to understand in looking at the Republican judicial selection process is that we are now looking at three--we are now looking at three nominees who have come through this process. It began when I was in Munich on a trip with Senator McCain and Judiciary Chairman Graham. He wasn't the chairman then, I don't believe. But we had gone to the Munich Security Conference together, and word came--in fact, I believe Senator Barrasso was there as well, who is now presiding. Word came that Justice Scalia had died on a hunting vacation and that there was a vacancy.

It became quickly evident that Merrick Garland, the chief judge of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals--a very widely respected judge, someone about whom Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee had said very good things in the past, presumably a consensus nominee--was likely to be the nominee of President Obama, a man who very often tried for consensus and very often was spurned.

In this case, it did not take long for someone to decide that was not going to happen and, indeed, that no Obama nominee was going to be brought forward. It happened quickly but not so quickly that a few Members of the Senate said that they would, of course, meet with the nominee. That would be standard practice; of course, they would.

In any event, my recollection is that no one did--no Republican Senator did. That was a very sudden pivot by an entire body of people to go from a normal process to something very new and abnormal. In my experience, when a whole lot of people all pivot together to go from what is normal to something that is new and abnormal, you look for a reason.

If you see all the branches blowing in one direction on a tree, you may be indoors. You may not actually be able to feel the wind blowing. But when you see all the branches lean, you can draw the reasonable conclusion--in fact, you can draw perhaps the only reasonable conclusion--that there is a wind blowing those branches, which begs the question: What was the wind blowing all those branches to so immediately step out of the norms of the Senate--not just 1 or 2 or 10 but as an entire caucus--and pivot to this new abnormal response to a Presidential nominee? To me, that is a sign. That is a sign that political force is being applied, that a strong wind is blowing, and that all the branches have to lean in the same direction.

On we went through that process with very, very strong statements being made by judges about this newly found principle that, during an election year, you don't confirm Supreme Court Justices. They invented that new principle--highly convenient to that moment, but they described it as a principle.

Here is Senator Daines in 2016: ``I don't think it's right to bring a nominee forward in an election year.'' He put it in about the strongest moral terms that one could use. He used terms of principle. He used the distinction between right and wrong. ``I don't think it's right to bring a nominee forward in an election year.'' Why? So that the people's voice--the people who have already begun voting had their voice reflected.

So that was probably--I don't know--maybe 8 months before the election. Here we are closer to 8 days before the election, and we are going through this process, and there has been this extraordinarily abrupt reversal of that supposed principle from 2016. ``I don't think it's right.'' If it is not right, why are we doing it right now? Suddenly, it is right in 2020.

Senator Daines wasn't alone. Mitch McConnell was the Senate floor orchestrator of all of this. He said: ``Of course, of course, the American people should have a say in the court's direction.'' That is why we can't take up Judge Garland now--because the American people should have their say months before the election. Here we are days before the election--flips-o, change-o. What could that mean?

Senator Grassley: ``The American people shouldn't be denied a voice.'' That was then; this is now.

Lindsey Graham: ``Hold the tape.'' ``Hold my words against me,'' the chairman said. If an opening--here was his rule: ``If an opening comes in the last year of President Trump's term, we'll wait till the next election.'' Could you get clearer than that? ``If an opening comes in the last year of President Trump's term, we'll wait till the next election.'' ``Hold the tape.''

Ted Cruz: ``You don't do this in an election year.''

So what does it signal when people take a stand assertively on principle that it wouldn't be right--Steve Daines; that ``you don't do this''--Ted Cruz; that ``of course, of course, the American people should have their say''--Mitch McConnell and Chuck Grassley--what does it say when people take a stand on principle on one occasion and then on the very next occasion, in the very next election, at the first opportunity, they completely reverse themselves on their supposed principle?

Well, one possibility is that there has been a minipandemic in the Senate of hypocrisy; that somehow there is a little germ here, and somebody brought hypocrisy into the Republican caucus, and everybody caught it, and they feel an unhealthy desire to go out and violate principles that they espoused on the previous occasion. That doesn't seem very credible to me.

What seems more credible is that something is blowing in the branches; that there is a force--a political force--at work that causes Republican Senators to take a firm stand on principle, albeit a novel one, a peculiar one, an unprecedented one, but in their words, a firm stand on principle in the 2016 election, and exactly in the very next case, in the 2020 election, completely reverse that supposed principle. My experience in politics is that when you see people forced to engage in hypocrisy in broad daylight, look for power in the shadows.

So we began with the Garland-Gorsuch switcheroo based on this ``you don't do this in an election year'' principle. Then we went on to Judge Kavanaugh, and the narrative has developed on the Republican side that Judge Kavanaugh was treated very unfairly, as if no witness came forward to testify in the Senate Judiciary Committee that she had been assaulted by a young Brett Kavanaugh. I don't know what we were supposed to do with that information. Were we supposed to tell the good professor: Go away. We don't want to hear from you. Sorry, it is a little late. The chance that a person headed for the Supreme Court might have committed sexual assault is something we don't take at all seriously. We don't want to get to the bottom of it. We don't want to know.

This was a woman who was willing to come and testify in front of all of America, subject herself to the hostile questioning of a professional prosecutor hired by the Republicans just for that occasion. She stuck to her guns and, in my view, was credible. To this day, I still believe her. The nature of her testimony was very consistent with the testimony of sexual assault victims who have been through that kind of an ordeal.

Do I know what happened? No. But she was a credible witness. She was willing to come into the Senate Judiciary Committee and claim that Brett Kavanaugh assaulted her. Of course, we had to hear from her. Republicans want to blame Democrats for that, but seriously, would you not have let her testify? Really? That does not seem very credible.

So she came. She testified. She was credible. Despite the rightwing having launched their flying monkeys at her in such vehemence, she had to leave her house, hire private security, go into hiding, she nevertheless came; she nevertheless was credible.

All we asked for was an investigation to find out what had happened, to do our best to get to the bottom of it. It was going to be difficult because it happened years ago, but it would seem to me that we owed this institution and the Supreme Court our best effort. Did we get a best effort? No, we got a slipshod, truncated decision that, to this day, the FBI refuses to answer questions about. Why? Why not give Dr. Blasey Ford, why not give the American people, why not give the Supreme Court a best effort from the FBI to get to the bottom of whatever happened?

There is every indication that the tip line the FBI set up was never reviewed and followed up on. I have been a prosecutor. I have run the attorney general's office in Rhode Island, which is the lead prosecutorial office for the State. I have been the U.S. attorney for Rhode Island, running Federal prosecutions. The whole purpose of a tip line is to bring in evidence from the public and sort through it because every tip line has bonkers evidence in it. But you sort through the chaff to see if there is any wheat there, if there is anything that needs to be looked into.

It does not appear that the FBI looked into anything that came in through the tip line. It looks like the tip line--if you could imagine the comments box, it looks like they attached the comments box directly to the dumpster so that the tips went straight into the waste bin. I know of no ``tip'' that got followed up on.

Once again, why? Why would the FBI allow itself to be associated with a truncated, incomplete investigation? Well, they said why. They said it was because they are not operating like an FBI when they do this. They are operating as an agent of the White House. They are operating at the White House's bidding when they are doing these confirmation investigations. They don't behave like the FBI then and follow their procedures. They do as they are told. That is a pretty strong clue and, once again, a signal of powerful political forces at work to try to cram nominees, even very troubled ones, onto the Supreme Court.

Then we come to Judge Barrett, who had to be the subject of this massive flips-o, change-o of what was right for our traditional nominees in an election year and enumerable minor broken rules along the way.

As I said, in all three of these recent nominations, there is a trail of procedural wreckage through the Senate. I don't think my colleagues hate Senate procedure. I don't think they get a form of malicious glee out of smashing Senate procedure. When you see a lot of procedural wreckage in the Senate, look for a motive. Look for a force. Look for a force.

Three for three, we have seen powerful signals of a motive force at work. Sure enough, when you look at the process itself, you see some real peculiarities.

First of all, when these judges got selected, they had something in common. They all went through a process hosted at the Federalist Society and run by a person named Leonard Leo. The Wall Street Journal editorial page editor described this relationship as a subcontractor. The judicial selection got subcontracted out to this private organization and its operative--subcontracted out. The White House counsel said this organization was insourced to the White House. Leonard Leo was put on temporary leave from the Federalist Society-- like that is a big deal--to supervise the process.

Can we just stop for a minute and accept that it is weird that any private organization would be made the subcontractor for the selection of Supreme Court Justices? I don't care if it is the Girl Scouts of America. It is weird and it is wrong that a private organization should be the subcontractor for selecting judges.

And it gets weirder and wronger when you see the big anonymous money pouring into that organization. The Washington Post took a pretty good, thorough look into this scheme, and they said that the whole scheme was $250 million worth of dark money--$250 million. They described it as ``a conservative activist's behind-the-scenes campaign to remake the Nation's courts.'' On whose behalf, one wonders. But you don't know because of the $250 million, most of it is anonymous money, what we call around here ``dark money.''

You have the last three nominees selected by a private organization, secretively, which is also taking huge donations from anonymous donors. The whole scheme runs up to $250 million, according to the Washington Post. That is a pretty big deal. If you can't see that that is a recipe for corruption, you are wearing blinders, because the idea that a private organization becomes designated to pick who is on the Supreme Court and then takes big anonymous donations is a prescription for disaster.

But it does produce nominees. At the end, you get your selection-- one, two, three. Then, those nominees get TV campaigns run for them. There is a big PR effort, a political effort, and that is run by something called the Judicial Crisis Network, which has as its operative Carrie Severino. Judicial Crisis Network gets boatloads of anonymous money also. You have the same problem--a private organization, a secret organization that takes boatloads of anonymous money having a central role in campaigning for these nominees. That is also abnormal. This is new, this is peculiar, and this is wrong, in my view.

By the way, when that Washington Post article came out, Leonard Leo got blown like an agent in a covert operation. And to protect the Federalist Society, he had to jump out, go do something else. So he went out to go do dark money-funded voter suppression. Guess who jumped into his role for Judge Barrett? Well, well, well, none other than Ms. Severino.

The Judicial Crisis Network offices are next to the Federal Society's offices--same building, same floor.

How big is the money? Well, here is a little filing from the Judicial Crisis Network. This is from IRS Form 990. Look at this, a contribution for $17.9 million--$17.9 million. Do we know who gave them $17.9 million to put on TV ads for a judicial nominee who had been selected by the dark money group behind the Federalist Society? We do not. We do not. But somebody wrote a $17 million check to support a PR campaign for a Supreme Court nominee. How do we know they didn't have business before the Supreme Court? How do we know that when they are anonymous?

By the way, they did it again. Somebody gave $17 million to push off Garland and help Gorsuch. And then another 17-plus million dollars came in for the troubled Kavanaugh nomination. Do we know that it is not the same donor? No, we don't. It could be the same donor, in which case somebody gave $35 million anonymously to influence the makeup of our U.S. Supreme Court.

And they may have business before the Court. There is a case called the Caperton case in which the Supreme Court said you had a due process right not to have Judges who had big money spent on their behalf to get the office rule in your case. This looks like a Caperton problem--$35 million spent by conceivably one donor who may very well have business before the Court.

Why would you do this? Why would you do this? Why would you ever allow judicial nominees to be selected this way, funded by dark money, anonymously, controlled by private, secretive organizations? Why would you do that? Why is that acceptable at all? I submit that were the shoe on the other foot, the other side would have its hair on fire about such a performance.

The fact that this seems OK is yet another indication of the branches blowing in the wind here because it is not OK by any objective or reasonable standard. The only thing that makes this OK is if that political force makes this OK in the same way they made it OK to reverse the 2016 principle on the very next occasion in 2020.

When you see hypocrisy in the daylight, look for power in the shadows.

It doesn't end once their judges are selected and once the judges have their campaigns paid for by $17-million check writers. When they are on the Court, guess who shows up in orchestrated choruses. Groups funded by dark money. In some cases, they are the litigating lawyer group. In some cases, they come on afterward as what are called friends of the court, amici curiae--friends of the court.

We had one case that I looked at about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where it turned out that a whole bunch of amici curiae showed up--friends of the court, a whole bunch of them. So I did this graphic in the brief that I filed. It showed 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 briefs filed in that case by nominally separate groups, all funded by the same organization, Donors Trust, 8 out of 11 funded by the Bradley Foundation, and more overlapping donors throughout. This was just my work.

The Center for Media and Democracy went back and did an even more thorough drill down and came to even more astonishing conclusions about the overlap between the funding of these groups showing up in these orchestrated choruses.

By the way, they don't tell the Court that they are all funded by the same groups. They don't tell the other parties that they are all funded by the same groups. There is actually a disclosure in the briefing rule that says you are supposed to disclose who paid for your briefing. They use that to mean who paid for the printing of the brief.

So you can take a million-dollar contribution from somebody or, who knows, a $17-million contribution from somebody, and then pay a couple of thousand bucks yourself to have the brief published and disclose nothing to the Court, nothing to the parties about who is really behind these phony-baloney, trumped-up, front-group friends of the court. But they do provide an educating chorus for the judges and tell them how to rule.

By the way, the Center for Media and Democracy showed that not only is the funding going to these groups, but the same funding is going over there to the Federalist Society to support this judicial selection operation. And from Judicial Crisis Network, you have the interchangeable Leonard Leo and Carrie Severino. This looks like a single scheme--a single scheme through which a small group of very secretive, big money donors, donors capable of writing a $17-million check to help influence who is on the Supreme Court, get together and control the selection of Supreme Court Justices, fund the PR campaigns and the TV advertisements for those Supreme Court Justices, and then show up through front groups to pitch the Justices on what they want from them.

That is about as unhealthy a situation for a Court as one could have. Again, we are like the frog--the alleged frog in the pot. It has gotten worse and worse. It has stunk more and more, but it happened kind of gradually and we, for some reason, acted as if this is somehow normal. There is nothing normal about this.

As a lawyer, I spent a good deal of my life in appellate courts. I have argued in the U.S. Supreme Court. I have argued in several circuit courts of appeals. I argued over and over before our State supreme court. To the extent I had a specialty, it was appellate law. As the Governor's legal counsel in Rhode Island, I was involved in picking judges for the State courts on the Judiciary Committee. I have been involved in picking judges for the Federal courts.

Folks, this is weird. This is not right. Nobody behaves this way. Nobody farms out the selection of judges to private interest groups that don't disclose their donors and take up to $250 million into the scheme, which is according to the Washington Post. It is weird enough that people feel the need to run TV ads for judicial nominees, but when they are taking a check for $17 million or two checks for $17 million from an anonymous donor or, maybe, two anonymous donors, if you think that is weird, it is because it is. That shouldn't happen anywhere around a court.

There are a lot of high-minded speeches about the importance of the judiciary and its independence and all of that. The most important standard that a court must meet is that it is not a pantomime court, a pantomime court in which the rituals of adjudication get acted out. People come to the bench, wearing their robes. They hear the arguments, render decisions, read the briefs, but at the end of the day, the decision is cooked by big special interest influence that has insinuated its way into the Court by controlling the selection of judges, by funding the PR campaigns for those judges, and by being the orchestrating force behind the amicus curiae.

You might think that I am being a little aggressive in suggesting that they are orchestrated. Well, do you remember this group, the Bradley Foundation, that I showed you from my Supreme Court checklist that funded 8 out of the 11 groups in that case? Here is a memo of a grant it is giving to something called the Judicial Education Project, which is a sister organization to that same Judicial Crisis Network. This is a little bit of a pea in a shell game, so forgive me, but they are directly related groups. The staff recommendation says that, at this highest of legal levels, it is a request for funding for amicus curiae in a case--in several cases--at the Supreme Court. It is very important to orchestrate high-caliber amicus efforts--orchestrate.

For Pete's sake, the secret funders themselves use the word ``orchestrate.'' So something is up. Something is not right. Something is rotten in Denmark. If the American people are good enough to entrust us with the ability to answer their questions about this mess, we will answer their questions about this mess. I will tell you that I cannot get my questions answered, not without gavels, not in this Senate, not in these committees. Yet I think it matters if an individual wrote $35 million worth of checks to influence the makeup of our U.S. Supreme Court to know whether they have business before the Court, to know who they were, and to be able to even do the Caperton analysis of whether somebody's due process rights have been infringed by influence.

So, in some respects, this is the end of things. This is the third of three nominees who have all had the same characteristics. They have been selected through this scheme. They have been campaigned for through this scheme. They have generated bizarre procedural behavior in this Senate--all three, three for three. It is like the triple trifecta--three judges, three characteristics: selected, campaigned for, bizarre procedural anomalies.

When you see that kind of behavior, that means there are a lot of branches leaning the same way, and if that doesn't mean the wind is blowing, then give me a better explanation. I think there is a foul wind blowing, and we need to find out who is behind it, and we need to find out what it means for our treasured Supreme Court.

I will close by saying that the results are already coming in. Even before Judge Barrett gets to the Court, the results have already been coming in from this effort.

I did an article some time ago that we had pretty thoroughly fact- checked, red-teamed, and reviewed that at the time said there were 72 decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Roberts, that had the following characteristics: One, they were 5-to-4 decisions--the narrowest, barest majority. Ordinarily, a Supreme Court likes to see bigger majorities than that because it is conducive to the integrity and strength and credibility of the Court. There were 72 5-to-4 decisions.

They had an additional characteristic in that they were not just 5 to 4 but a partisan 5 to 4. No Democratic appointee joined the 5. So, again, if you are an institutionalist, you look at that, and you think, hmm, maybe that is not the Court putting its best foot forward. That is an awful lot of partisan 5-to-4 decisions.

Then the third characteristic is that you can identify quite readily in those cases a big Republican donor's interest--something that one would want by way of an outcome. What we calculated at the time in that article is that the score in those 72 5-to-4 partisan decisions with a big Republican donor's interest implicated was 72 to 0--some pitching balls and calling balls and strikes. It was 72 to 0. That is a route, and we have been tracking it since then. I put the number now to 80 to 0 because the article was written some time ago. So now we are at 80 partisan 5-to-4 cases in which a big Republican donor's interest was implicated and in which, by 80 to 0, the Big Interests won.

Now, some of these are pretty flagrant. I think Citizens United is going to go down in history as a disgraceful decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, sort of the political equivalent of Lochner.

Shelby County, in which the Court made up facts in order to strip a section out of the Voting Rights Act, in turn, unleashed voter suppression laws across the States that had been held back by the preclearance provisions that the Court summarily decided 5 to 4 that it didn't like any longer.

Janus, which is the case that took down a 40-year-old precedent involving labor law in which legal groups had an astonishing role, actually went through four cases along the way. It is a long saga, and I won't burden this speech with that now. At the end of the day, the lawyers for the labor movement, while walking up to the Supreme Court for argument that day, knew perfectly well how the Court was going to rule. That is not how courts should operate

Heller, the gun case, was 5 to 4. A former Supreme Court Justice had described the theory that Heller had adopted as a fraud on the public, but Heller turned a fraud on the public into the law of the land. Guess what--the NRA is very active as a donor in these fights. The NRA was all over the Kavanaugh nomination in particular.

So you had these flagrant decisions, and I just mentioned those 4, but there are 80. That leaves 76 others. They are usually--often, I should say--about power. They are often about moving power into corporations, expanding corporate power, allowing unlimited money into elections--allowing dark, anonymous, unlimited money to operate in elections.

Who benefits from that? Entities with unlimited money and a motive to spend it like, say, the fossil fuel industry.

As for intervening in elections and allowing bulk gerrymandering to proceed, multiple courts have figured out how to stop that nefarious practice. It is, actually, not complicated when you are dealing with bulk gerrymandering and how to stop it and, over and over again, the bulk gerrymandering efforts to take an entire delegation and try to cook it so that it doesn't represent the popular vote in that State.

Over and over again, courts have seen through that. They figured out how to respond to it until it got to the Supreme Court. Then, with 5 to 4, sorry, folks, we are not going to take an interest in that. Keep at it. Voter suppression will tear down the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act. All of this election mischief that leans heavily to supporting the Republican side has been supported.

With deregulation, if you are a big polluter and if you are a big donor, you probably don't like regulatory agencies. You probably would like to have some more freedom from regulatory agencies. Over and over again, these decisions try to hurt the independence and strength of regulatory agencies--over and over.

Then the last is the civil jury. My God, the civil jury is in the Constitution, for Pete's sake. We fought so hard over the civil jury that people didn't want to adopt the Constitution until there was a Seventh Amendment that protected it in the Bill of Rights. Protecting the civil jury was in the Declaration of Independence. Interference of the civil jury by the Crown was a cause of war in the Revolutionary Era.

The civil jury is an institution of governance in this country. It is a big deal. Yet these supposed originalists on the Court keep tearing down, whittling away, diminishing, and degrading the civil jury because--guess what--if you are a big, powerful, well-funded lobbyist, greased corporation, or interest group, you can march around this place like a King, throwing your money around, getting everybody to bow and scrape for you, with lobbyists smoothing the path for you. You can wander into the executive branch if you have the right control and get your stooges appointed to the regulatory agencies. You can be powerful. You can get your way.

Then you have to suffer the indignity of showing up in a courtroom where you have to be treated equally before the law, where what you say has to be put to the test of perjury, where you have to turn over your real documents and not phonied-up position papers, where, if you tamper with the jury, it is a crime.

No wonder big special interests don't like civil juries, and no wonder this Court, 5 to 4, over and over again, chops away at the institution of the civil jury, but don't tell me that you are being an institutionalist or an originalist when you are attacking an institution in the Constitution--in the Seventh Amendment, the Bill of Rights. That is the work that these 80 5-to-4 partisan decisions have been doing. It has been to turn this Court, more and more, into the servant of big corporations. Guess what. Americans are paying attention.

There was a poll a little while ago that asked whether the Supreme Court favors corporations more than people or people more than corporations. The poll showed, 49 to 7, that 7 times as many Americans think the Supreme Court views corporations more favorably than people than say the Court views people more favorably than corporations. So something is out. Something is up. A foul wind is blowing. There is way too much anonymous money in and around this Court process.

It is, by the way, at the same time, the only Court that does not have a code of ethics in the Federal system. When Judge Barrett is elevated from her circuit court to the Supreme Court, she will go from a court that has a judicial code of conduct to a Court that does not. She will go from a court that requires the transparent disclosure of gifts, travel, and hospitality to a Court that requires less disclosure not only than circuit courts but less disclosure than Cabinet officials and less disclosure than Members of Congress. The highest Court has the lowest standards for ethics and transparency.

So, to all of my colleagues who have given speeches about the integrity and value of the Supreme Court and our judicial branch, I hope you will help us as we try to look at what on Earth is exactly going on over there--why amici curiae show up in Court without disclosing who they are really there for; why $17-plus million checks are being written by anonymous individuals, what the relationship is between the $250 million that poured into Leonard Leo's effort and who got chosen, and what the expectations were of the people who spent $250 million to influence the makeup of the Supreme Court; and why the highest Court has the lowest standards for ethics and for transparency.

We are not in a good place right now with this Court. The things that are happening are truly bizarre, unprecedented. It is bad enough that there should be dark money in elections--but dark money in judicial selections? Please defend that if you think that is right. If you think that big special interests should be able to write big, anonymous checks and, thereby, gain a voice in the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court, please come and defend that proposition, because I don't think you can.

It has never been the case in the Supreme Court before. It has never been the case in the circuit courts of appeal before. It has never been the case in State supreme courts, in my experience.

The dark-money influence in and around the Court is unprecedented, and it is wrong, and the American people are entitled to the truth about it.

I see I have gone into my next speaker's time a bit. So I will yield the floor.

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