[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 129 (Tuesday, August 2, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3856-S3857]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           U.S. SUPREME COURT

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, every once in a while, life gives 
you a wonderful coincidence. The wonderful coincidence this evening is 
that I have had the pleasure of listening to Senator Sanders describe 
what happens to a country when billionaires are able to secretly exert 
immense political power and drive democracy away from its foundations 
and into the service of the billionaires.
  The remarks I am here to give are about how they do it--the technique 
for infiltration and influence of our democracy by the billionaires. 
This is part of my series of ``Scheme'' speeches, which is about how 
they have taken over the Supreme Court--captured it--in the same way 
that, in the 1800s, big railroads captured the railroad commissions 
that were supposed to set their rates. They just had their people set 
the rules for them, and it worked great. We are seeing this with the 
Supreme Court right now. This is not a conservative Supreme Court. This 
is a captive Supreme Court--captive to special interests--and the 
technique that they use for getting there is to hide who they are 
through an array of front groups.
  There are dozens of front groups that were involved in the Court-
capture scheme. The Washington Post did a very good review of them 
several years ago and calculated, based on information they could get 
at the time, that this was a quarter-billion-dollar project--$250 
million. Well, the research continued, and folks kept digging. When I 
held a hearing about this in my Judiciary court subcommittee, the 
number had climbed to $400 million spent on the Court-capture 
enterprise. They have kept digging and kept digging, and now it turns 
out the number is over $580 million. Over a half a billion dollars was 
spent in this effort to capture and control the U.S. Supreme Court.
  I don't think you spend over $580 million unless you have a purpose, 
and very often, the purpose is to make that much money back and more. 
There is a web of front groups that are used to deploy all of that 
money, and this is just a part of that web. This is just one sort of 
combined creature in that web. So let me take a few minutes and just go 
through the different organs and limbs of this creature.

  The center of it is a pair of organizations, the 85 Fund and the 
Concord Fund. The way that extremely wealthy people play in politics 
these days is to put two organizations together that they establish 
under the Tax Code. One is called a 501(c)(3), which is named after the 
section of the Tax Code under which it is established. The 501(c)(3) 
gives you two wonderful things if you are fiddling in politics. One, it 
gives us anonymity, wherein you don't have to disclose your donors; 
and, two, it gives you a tax deduction. You get to write off the money 
that you give to manipulate the American public. But you can't do 
something very important with a 501(c)(3): You can't go out and 
manipulate public opinion. You can't participate in elections. So, when 
you do that, you need to have something else called a 501(c)(4), the 
very next provision in the IRS Code. So you take your 501(c)(3), and 
you take your 501(c)(4), and you set them both up.
  In my view, there is usually no real distinction between the two. 
There is a doctrine in law called piercing the corporate veil that 
separates separate corporate entities, that allows people who are 
trying to pursue usually damages to show that this is a fake corporate 
division. You pierce the corporate veil. The 501(c)(3)s and 501(c)(4)s 
are a corporate veil that you could probably pierce with a banana. They 
have the same locations; they have the same mailing addresses; they 
have the same staff; they have the same board members; they have the 
same funders. It is essentially the same organization, but it just 
operates under two legal structures.
  So that is what you have for starters. You have got your twinned 
front groups. The 85 Fund is your 501(c)(3), and the Concord Fund is 
your 501(c)(4). They are essentially the same creature, but in this 
case, this organism has other limbs. So what you can do under Virginia 
corporate law is, if you are the 85 Fund or the Concord Fund, you could 
file with the corporate registry in the State of Virginia permission to 
operate under what is called a fictitious name. You can operate under 
your own name, the 85 Fund, or you can file, with permission, a 
fictitious name. I am not making that up. That is actually the word in 
Virginia law--a ``fictitious name.''
  Well, the 85 Fund filed for permission to operate under the 
fictitious name of the Judicial Education Project--the 501(c)(3) that 
takes in money, and ``tax deductibly,'' to work on the capture of the 
Court. On the other side, over here, the Concord Fund, your twinned 
501(c)(4), has its own twinned fictitious name. So the Judicial 
Education Project has its own little twin in the Judicial Crisis 
Network.
  Well, what do we know about the Judicial Crisis Network?
  We know that it took checks for as much as $15, $17 million from 
secret donors. Imagine writing a $15 million check to an organization 
like this. It took that money, and it first ran campaigns to attack 
Merrick Garland, to round up Republican support for opposing him as a 
Supreme Court Justice. Then, when that was successful and they brought 
on Judge Gorsuch, in came other big checks. Then, when Gorsuch was on 
the Court and it was time for Kavanaugh--other big checks. Then, when 
it was time for Amy Coney Barrett--other big checks. We have counted 
four checks over $15 million. They could be from four separate 
individuals, but it was happening so regularly you would think you 
would probably go back to the same source. Somebody spent, probably, 
$60 million to control who got on the U.S. Supreme Court.
  We don't know what business that $60 million donor had before the 
Court, but it is not unusual for cases before the Court to have 
outcomes that will shift way more than $60 million. Just the climate 
change cases move hundreds of billions of dollars around in protecting 
fossil fuels' enormous subsidy. So you have your 85 Fund and Concord 
Fund ``pierce the corporate veil with a banana'' pair, and then you 
have their fictitious twins, the Judicial Education Project and the 
Judicial Crisis Network, with big money flowing in.
  But it is not enough just to pack the Court. You also want to make 
sure that you are suppressing voters. Voter suppression is a very big 
deal, so you set up your Honest Elections Project to do voter 
suppression because, in this weird, billionaire-funded parallel 
universe, everything has the opposite name of what it is. Over here, 
you have, on the 501(c)(4) side, your Honest Elections Project Action 
because there you can spend some of the money politically. So you have 
got a whole separate set of twins--this time, completely fictitious 
twins, fictitious names--no different from the 85 Fund and the Concord 
Fund--designed to go out in the world and suppress voting: bring 
lawsuits, write challenge letters, argue for new laws.
  Then, as we saw in Virginia recently, you can really whip people up 
about what is going on in schools--critical race theory. So you set up 
your Free to Learn fictitious name with its little twin, Free to Learn 
Action, to do the 501(c)(4) political work. So now what you have is a 
total of eight organizations that are really the same.

  Who does this? Who in real life does this, sets up eight 
organizations, six of which are mere fictitious names, to run the same 
money from the same donors out in the world to make it look as if

[[Page S3857]]

something real is happening, when, in fact, the whole thing is a phony 
front?
  And then you have, up at the head of the critter--you have how the 
people behind it get themselves paid. So you have advisers who advise 
these various entities. You have got the CRC Advisors as the name of 
the group. It has its public relations antenna here, and it has its 
strategic advice antenna here, and the money flows usually this way so 
that the people who run this scheme for the big donors can take their 
cut. They get paid here. These are all for-profit. These are all the 
not-for-profits that are set up because they allow you to hide who your 
donors are.
  So that is the rig that was set up, and this is not the entirety of 
the front group scheme that was funded by the $580 million. This is 
just one coordinated corporate critter that was set up in order to 
perform all of these different several functions.
  Think back to the Founding Fathers and their desire to set up a 
democracy where people made choices about their governments, where 
popular democracy would be the way in which society went forward. Do 
you think they had in mind something as creepy and complex as this? And 
do you think all that effort to build all this scheming, all the 
lawyers to file all the papers, to cook up all the funny, fictitious 
names to create all of these bogus organizations--what is the point of 
all that? Could there be a legitimate point to that? Why all the 
shells? Why all the hiding if you are not up to no good?
  Well, the bottom line is, they are up to no good. And the ``no good'' 
is to capture the U.S. Supreme Court and turn it from a proper Court 
into a captive political entity that will do what the people who are 
behind all this money tell it to do.
  And there are many ways they do it, and I will go into those many 
ways on other occasions. But on this one occasion, I wanted just to 
focus on this multifaced corporate creature that hides its donors, that 
does all of this different work through fake, fictitious name 
organizations and through which money gets extracted by those who run 
it so they can pay themselves for this vast disservice to democracy.
  To be continued.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.

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