The original draft of this letter to the editor was submitted to the Wall Street Journal in reposnse to an editorial criticizing Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D) for regularly threatening the U.S. Supreme Court, most recently as he tries to force the court to ignore long-settled First Amendment law and begin revealing the names of donors that even indirectly contribute to the writing and submission of amicus briefs. Copied on the LTE submission were Sen. Whitehouse himself, his senior staff, the senator’s Judiciary Committee colleague Dick Durbin (who has his own history of trying to dox contributors to conservative-leaning nonprofits), committee minority staff, a high court communications officicial, and several major media court correspondents.
To the Editor:
It’s a safe bet that the lisping, effeminate schoolboy once known as Shelly Whitehouse was pushed down in the playground dirt and subjected to atomic wedgies on a semi-regular basis. And as the criminologists and profilers tell us, the abused often become abusers. How else to explain Sen. Whitehouse’s incessant bullying of the Supreme Court these days [“Sheldon Whitehouse vs. the Supreme Court,” editorial, Mar. 10)]?
In any case, if Chief Justice John Roberts had been raised by my five-foot tall, 108-pounds-soaking-wet mother, who I once watched put the fear of God into four rather large, drunken reprobates who’d been incorrigibly swearing their heads off in close proximity to her young children at Yankee Stadium in 1969, he’d know it was time to confront his Senate tormenter directly.
Whether in a rare written statement issued by the high court today or in the chief justice’s next public speech, he should call out Mr. Whitehouse by name and make clear in no uncertain terms that any “legislative solution” to imagined problems with free speech and association that might be signed into law by any president would be promptly struck down by a unanimous court as an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers, to say nothing of that pesky First Amendment.
Darren McKinney
Washington, D.C.