Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: 
In World Wars I and Il, it was common for naval vessels to burn oil and create thick clouds of smoke they could hide behind. The smoke threw off the gunnery of their adversaries.
Those gunners may not have been able to target the smoke-screened ships with precision, but they sure as hell knew there were battleships in the smoke. Here too there are battleships in the smoke.
While there are specifics we do not know about the Scheme [to capture the Supreme Court] because of its dark-money smokescreen, there is a lot that we do know, and all of it points to the same conclusion. Let’s review the evidence.
We know first that there has been enormous effort to keep the Scheme secret. Organizations with multiple “fictitious names” are not ordinary; neither are massive hidden donors; nor is dark money.
It’s weird. That smoke is a clue in and of itself.
We know that front groups by the dozen were co-opted or created to facilitate the Scheme and that over half a billion dollars was run through them.
People don’t spend more than half a billion dollars for no reason.
We know that never before in history have judicial selections to the Court been turned over to a partisan private organization, let alone one simultaneously receiving massive anonymous donations. We know this happened, because the President, and his counsel, and the organization receiving the funds all admitted it . . . .
We are in a crisis of judicial legitimacy, a five-alarm fire fueled and stoked by anti-government billionaires whose anti-democratic, anti-consumer, anti-worker, anti-women agenda is becoming increasingly hard to hide–but now that they have six justices, they really don’t need to hide much.. . .
[T]he radical right long ago realized that it could not achieve its objectives openly. Goldwater lost in a rout. David Koch’s libertarian campaign [for Vice President in 1980] won just 1 percent of the vote. The far-right “Reagan Revolution” attack ended with a whimper, and the far-right nominee [Robert] Bork got a bipartisan rejection in the Senate. Even after all of the Federalist Society’s years of work and recruitment -and the avenue to high judicial office it provides–its membership encompasses not even 6 percent of American lawyers.
How do oligarchs push their rejected agenda in the face of the reality that the majority of Americans simply don’t share their worldview?
Appoint judges who do, and drive change clandestinely through the undemocratic courts.
The Roberts Court embodies as well as imposes minority rule. . . .
The most important responsibility, as the Court’s standing falls, is on the Court itself. But if the Court is a willing victim of its degradation, linked to and loyal to the dark-money apparatus that is the instrument of its degradation, then reliance on the Court to save itself may be misplaced.
In that case, Congress will have to step in.
When we do, the dark arts of the dark-money apparatus behind the Scheme will be brought to bear with maximum political force to protect and defend its captured
Court. It will be a battle for the ages, as well as a battle for the Court.
As we battle for the soul of the Court, no reform will be meaningful if we do not disrupt the flow of undisclosed dark money into all stages of the pipeline: the pseudo-academic hothouses that make it worth someone’s while to manufacture reverse-engineered theories; the organizations that indoctrinate, groom, and audition judicial candidates; a Senate that has abandoned its own institutional processes and prerogatives to install reliable policy agents on the courts; and a Supreme Court whose “ethics” program has neither binding rules nor referees. Nor will it be meaningful if we do not grapple with the damage already done, procured through unprincipled decisions that rewarded unprincipled special interests.
The worst of the damage is the damage done to American democracy.
I don’t relish calling out this cherished American institution. But the only thing worse than calling out a captured Court would be a captured Court that no one calls out.
The restoration of the Court should not be a Republican or Democratic project. It should be an American project, to restore democracy’s City on a Hill.
If we care about our constitutional system-a system of, by, and for the people, not corporations and secret billionaires-something must be done, and soon.
As a certain Virginia attorney and soon-to-be justice [Lewis Powell] once wrote, we are in deep trouble. And the hour is late.
Part of the legacy of “Shotgun” Scalia: 
Previous posts on “The Scheme” and the rightwing capture of the Supreme Court:
- The Big Read: “Supreme Beings” — Taking on the Architects of Our Emerging Judicially-Spawned Authoritarian Order
- More on “The Scheme” — Part 1
- “Shotgun” Scalia: A study in Supreme Corruption & Impunity
- The Scheme: The “Captured” Supreme Court Is Stealing Our Right to Jury Trials