Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat, represents Rhode Island in the U.S. Senate.
Politics is a team sport. We battle, and our courts are supposed to referee our disputes.
But what if one team spent years and millions of dollars to capture the referees, so the refs could declare that team the winner whenever they fell short on the field? If you were on the other team, you’d cry foul. You’d ask: “Hey, when did the law become a team sport, too?’’
A few weeks ago, several Senate colleagues and I did just that when we filed a friend-of-the-court brief in a case before the Supreme Court in which the National Rifle Association had urged the court to continue its “project” (the NRA’s term) to undermine gun regulations.
We cried foul. That triggered a remarkable response.
Conservative media lit up in unison. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, for instance, attacked us for advocating “court packing,” something we did not advocate. The Journal used language so similar to a separate National Review op-ed that it issued an unusual editor’s note denying plagiarism. Then, all 53 Republicans in the Senate cranked out a letter to the court’s clerk decrying our brief. What hoopla.
