[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 138 (Tuesday, August 4, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4717-S4718]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             CLIMATE CHANGE

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here today for a different topic. 
I am here for the 269th time with my increasingly battered ``Time to 
Wake Up'' poster to try to alert this Chamber to the threat of climate 
change--something, obviously, Louisiana knows very well--and to the 
forces that are blocking action on climate.
  In these climate speeches, I have talked often about the insidious 
encroachment on American Government of special interest power, which is 
what is behind all this climate denial and obstruction.
  It didn't happen on its own. The fossil fuel industry's political 
forces used the cover of anonymous funding--what we call dark money--
and they used phony front groups and clever propaganda to accomplish 
their aims.
  In effect, these fossil fuel political forces have run a covert 
operation against our own government. We observe the disturbances; we 
hear the rustling in the leaves; we see strange sites, but many of us 
haven't connected the dots. Those who are familiar with some of the 
elements may not put the whole story together. Some are so accustomed 
to this sinister behavior that they think it is normal. Some folks are 
like a city dweller in the jungle, needing a field biologist to 
identify the behaviors going on around them.
  Let me give you this field biologist's overview. We understand pretty 
well the crew of bad actors lurking behind climate denial. Democrats in 
the Senate have repeatedly called out and reported on this web of 
denial funded by the fossil fuel industry. Investigative journalists 
like Jane Mayer and scholars like Naomi Oreskes have dug into this 
scheme. There is actually a robust academic subspecialty that analyzes 
this web of denial as a novel socioeconomic and political phenomenon.
  The covert special interest machinery behind that effort is not just 
dedicated to opposing climate legislation. Another covert operation it 
runs is chronicled in our recent Senate Democrats' report here that 
examines the bad actors behind the special interest Court capture 
operation. This operation has crept forward over years, even decades. 
The Republican Party is more the tool of this effort than its 
principal. Big donors are behind it. The goal here is to fashion for 
the donors a Supreme Court that will not just rule for but reset 
society's ground rules to favor the big donors behind the scheme.
  On yet another front, there has been recent public reporting 
revealing the bad actors rushing to stand up a new and improved 
Republican voter suppression apparatus as they start to panic about the 
November election.
  Earlier this year, longtime partisan court fixer Leonard Leo stepped 
down from his formal role as executive vice president of the Court 
capture command center at the Federalist Society. At the same time, a 
mysterious new project called the Honest Elections Project began voter 
suppression work in swing States like Florida, Nevada, Wisconsin, and 
Michigan. It ran ads accusing Democrats of cheating with mail-in 
ballots; it sent threatening letters to election officials challenging 
voter rolls; and it filed legal proceedings--lots of legal 
proceedings--arguing for more voting restrictions ahead of November.
  But in their hurry, they did a weak job of covering their tracks. 
Reporters quickly uncovered that the Honest Elections Project is a 
rebrand of the Judicial Education Project--a key cog in that same 
Leonard Leo's machine.
  As the Guardian reporters who broke the story observed, ``By having a 
hand in both voting litigation and the judges on the Federal bench, 
[Leo's] network could create a system where conservative donors have an 
avenue to both oppose voting rights and appoint judges who would back 
at that effort.''
  Last, we pretty well know who funds the massive and often anonymous 
political operation that props up the Republican Party. Take 2016, for 
instance, when the fossil fuel billionaire Koch brothers' political 
operation spent $2 million on ads targeting viable Democratic 
candidates in just two Senate races--Ohio and Wisconsin
  Over a year before the election, they were already at work bombing 
those candidates. They didn't use their names. They hid behind phony 
front groups. It took years to dig this out, but that is what happened.
  The anonymously funded U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent nearly $40 
million in 2016 and 2018 supporting Republican House and Senate 
candidates.
  Dark waves of untraceable dark money pour everywhere into Republican 
elections. From slips and leaks and investigative reporting, we can see 
enough overlap across these four efforts to state the general 
proposition: It is the same crew.
  If you look at it as a covert operation run by special interests 
against their own country, it has at least these four programs, but it 
has one set of interests behind it: They run the climate denial covert 
op. They run the Court capture covert op. They rushed out the voter 
suppression op. And, with their money, they captured the Republican 
Party to use as their front.
  If this operation were not covert, if it were obvious, if the press 
and the public could readily connect the dots, it wouldn't work. People 
would know it was fossil fuel polluter money. They

[[Page S4718]]

would get the joke. That is why it has to be a covert operation, and 
that means it needs dark money--anonymous, untraceable funds.
  A virulent little galaxy of 501(c)(4) groups, shell corporations, 
donor trusts, and other screening tools has been crafted to anonymize 
the donors and hide the connections. Why? Because the blood pumping 
through this beast that gives it life is dark money. If we expose that 
secret blood flow, the whole beast shrivels up: no dark money, no 
covert operations.
  That is why efforts to expose the dark money donors provoke such 
hysterical reactions from the front groups and from their operatives 
and from their mouthpieces like the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
  I have experienced these hysterical reactions over and over. Indeed, 
there was one in the news today. This speech might provoke even 
another.
  But at the end of the day, as Americans, I believe we share the 
proposition that nothing could be more corrupting than large flows of 
anonymous money in politics. That sort of money doesn't even have to be 
spent to be corrupting. The mere threat of a political attack can do 
the job, and the donor saves the money. Or it could be a private 
promise of unlimited support.
  Once a political weapon is permissible, private threats and promises 
to use or withhold that weapon are inevitable, and they are inevitably 
corrupting.
  But don't think the prospect of corruption daunts the schemers. A 
political regime that allows their corruption and helps cover up their 
covert operations is precisely what the dark money donors want.
  Why else would we do nothing about climate change when it is so 
obvious? Why else would we ignore every respectable scientist in the 
field? Why else ignore warnings of financial meltdown looming from 
bankers and economists across the country, even across the world? Why 
else ignore the fires that are burning up Siberia, for Pete's sake, 
and, closer to home, the flood warnings along our coasts and the 
droughts and the floods and the storms across our States?
  When astronomers see celestial bodies behave inexplicably, they look 
for the dark star, the black hole that influences the behavior of the 
visible bodies. Dark money is the dark star, the evil star influencing 
Congress's behavior--or I should say misbehavior--on climate change.
  So a preview of coming attractions here: The dark-money-funded race 
to capture the Court is also a race by the schemers to establish a new 
constitutional doctrine protecting their dark money schemes. Such a 
doctrine is already being grown in the dark-money-funded ideological 
hothouses, a theory that dark money anonymity is protected by the First 
Amendment rights of association and petition--a theory giving powerful 
interests the constitutional right to run covert operations against 
their own government, leaving regular citizens beguiled or bewildered.
  That theory may seem ludicrous, and, indeed, this notion got only the 
one vote from Justice Thomas in Citizens United, but remember that 
Thomas is the dark money crowd's leading indicator on the Court.
  Don't scoff. This argument is now popping up all over the corporate 
rightwing. Twice so far I have had corporate entities from whom I 
requested information about their dark money dealings ``plead the 
First'' in response to my questions.
  The game is on, whether we realize it or not, and one of the stakes 
in the game is climate action. We cannot be idle about this. Groups 
that run covert operations against our own country are not to be 
trusted with that country's welfare.
  What a foul convergence it would be if the dark money schemers used 
dark money to fund a Court capture operation that delivered a Court-
created doctrine hatched in dark money hothouses, protecting that dark 
money from disclosure for eternity, permanently etching into our 
Constitution this pathway of corruption.
  As I have said over and over, take away the corrupting dark money 
weaponry from the fossil fuel industry, and we solve climate change. We 
have lost a decade to Citizens United, the decision that gave this 
industry the weaponry to kill climate bipartisanship. It is a decade we 
and our children will rue having lost.
  Let's lose no more time. Let's, once and for all, root out the 
corrupting dark money machinery, expose its nefarious and crooked 
covert operations, shut it down, and start running a real democracy 
around here again.
  If we can't do this now, then let's pray for an election that lets us 
do it soon.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio

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