[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 94 (Monday, June 3, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3921-S3924]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                           U.S. Supreme Court

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, as the presiding officer knows, I 
have come regularly to the floor to discuss multiple aspects of the 
scheme run by a bunch of rightwing billionaires to capture and control 
the Supreme Court and how that has come to affect so many Americans' 
lives.
  Well, in case there were not enough ethics problems already at the 
Supreme Court after the billionaire gift program for certain Justices 
gave them luxurious, free, undisclosed travel gifts around the world, 
paid for homes for parents, education for dependents, and even an 
expensive motor coach that appears never to have had the principal 
repaid.
  Now we know that MAGA battle flags were flown over the Alito 
residences. We don't know all the facts of what happened. We do know 
that Alito's version of events differs from corroborated statements of 
other witnesses to

[[Page S3922]]

those events, and for sure we know that people need to be able to trust 
that judges maintain the highest standards of impartiality, which 
includes avoiding even the appearance of bias.
  And say what you will about the excuses and the reasons for flying 
MAGA battle flags over the house of a Supreme Court Justice, you cannot 
say that those flags did not appear. You cannot say that they did not 
create an appearance that, to a reasonable person, would raise serious 
questions about whether that Justice flying MAGA battle flags over his 
home had a bias, particularly with respect to cases arising out of the 
January 6 MAGA insurrection.
  Whatever those fact differences are, they are important to try to get 
to the bottom of. And the problem is: It is hard to get those fact 
differences resolved because alone in the entire Federal Government--
alone--Supreme Court Justices are subject to no factfinding process. If 
the presiding officer or me or the minority leader or the majority 
leader were subject to ethics complaints here in the Senate, our Ethics 
Committee has the ability to investigate and to do factfinding, and 
even to take statements. It is true over in the House as well. Even the 
powerful Speaker of the House can be subject to sanction, can be 
subject to investigation, and to have to make statements. Heck, 
President Biden sat for an official interview about the documents in 
his garage. But the Justices--and only the nine Justices--are protected 
even from any factfinding, the most rudimentary foundation of legal 
process.
  And it is ironic because, in theory, the Supreme Court is supposed to 
defend the integrity of legal process in this country, and what they do 
is they exempt themselves from its most rudimentary pillar.
  Obviously, this is all part of a long string of problematic behavior 
that has come to the public's attention, none of which has received 
adequate factfinding over at the Court.
  So, for sure, these far-right Justices have demonstrated they need to 
be subject to an enforceable ethics code. You remember the routine they 
have been on? First it was: Don't bother us. This is nobody's concern.
  And then it was: Oh, all right. We have this ethics statements that 
we are going to put out about our ethics.
  And that wasn't good enough. So it was then: OK. OK. We will do an 
ethics code.
  But it is like: We will play by the rules of baseball, except for 
that part about umpires. So we will have an ethics code. We will play 
by the rules of baseball, but we will get to call our own balls and 
strikes, and we will get to call ourselves safe on base every time, and 
there will be no dispute because there is no factfinding to be done.
  We also know that the Justices won't talk to us about their messes, 
about this problem. Justice Roberts just declined a meeting with the 
chairs of the Judiciary Committee and the Court's Subcommittee.
  Alito sent us a letter expanding on his challenged version of events, 
but his correspondence is not subject to the veracity discipline of any 
sanction for falsehoods and omissions.
  Again, and making matters worse, Alito's story conflicts with the 
accounts of other people involved, and the Supreme Court, uniquely in 
all of government, has no mechanism for getting to the truth. So if the 
Court won't create one, then we need to. And my Supreme Court ethics 
bill would do just that.
  Every investigator knows that you have to take a proper statement to 
get to the truth. The Supreme Court itself took statements from 
employees when it was investigating the Alito-Dobbs draft opinion leak.
  But no matter what the circumstances, no matter how bad it gets, no 
factfinding process applies to the nine Justices--just them. Everybody 
else in the government is subject to some factfinding process--not 
them. That can be fixed.
  Nowhere is the Supreme Court forbidden to have an inbox for ethics 
complaints. Nowhere is the Supreme Court forbidden to hire clerical 
staff to sort out nutty from legitimate ethics complaints. Nowhere is 
the Court forbidden to hire staff attorneys to look into the legitimate 
ethics complaints and do a little investigating. Nowhere is the Court 
forbidden to allow the staff attorneys to interview Justices to help 
determine what the facts are.
  ``I am sorry, sir. This should take less than an hour, but I need to 
go through the events in this complaint and get your statement of what 
the facts are here.'' That is not hard.
  And nowhere is the Court forbidden from allowing, for instance, a 
panel of senior respected Federal chief judges who administer the 
ethics code in their own circuits to compare what the Justices did, 
what the factfinding investigation revealed, with what those chief 
judges would allow in their circuits and then make that comparison 
public.
  None of that offends the separation of powers. It would be all run 
within the judicial branch. And even without any actual disciplinary 
punishment, the rebuke of a Supreme Court Justice being told that their 
conduct wouldn't fly in other Federal courts would be a powerful 
corrective and deterrent.
  There is an old saying that the best way to show one stick is crooked 
is to lay a straight stick down next to it. A panel of senior and 
respected Chief Judges could provide that straight stick. Even on an 
advisory basis, the straight stick would be valuable.
  And we are going to continue working both on the Judiciary and 
Finance Committees to get to the bottom of the mischief at the Court.


                252nd Anniversary of the ``Gaspee'' Raid

  Madam President, now, if I may, I would like to change the topic to 
my favorite annual presentation here in the Senate, and that is to 
commemorate the anniversary of the burning of the Gaspee.
  The Gaspee was a revenue cutter of the Royal Navy that was operating 
in Rhode Island waters, annoying and harassing the shipowners and the 
crews who were engaged in maritime trade. And they got so fed up that, 
one day, a trading ship called the Hannah was working her way up 
Narragansett Bay, and the Gaspee came along and instructed the Hannah 
that it should pull up and allow itself to be inspected, boarded, and 
potentially seized by Her Majesty's government.
  They were doing a lot of that, by the way. It might have come back to 
bite them.
  There was a ship called the Fortune, which was owned by a Rhode 
Islander. It was seized, taken up to Boston, and sold. And, at the 
time, one of the owners was not all that involved in the activities 
that led to the Revolution, but he got a little bit motivated when his 
boat got seized and his cargo seized and all of his goods were taken 
and the value shipped back to the King. He was Nathanael Greene. He 
ended up becoming Washington's aide-de-camp. He ended up running the 
southern campaign for George Washington. And the British general who 
was trying to manage the American Revolution wrote back to his wife: 
That damn Greene is more dangerous than Washington.
  So it can be provoking to have your ship seized.
  Anyway, there is the Hannah sailing up the bay. Here comes the Gaspee 
in hot pursuit. The Hannah has a wily captain who knows the waters 
quite well and sails the Hannah over shallows, where a river comes into 
the bay and leaves a sandy trail along the bottom.
  And so the Hannah shoots over the shallows, and along comes the 
rather bigger, more lumbering Gaspee and grinds into the sandbar. And 
it is stuck. And the tide is falling. So it is going to be there for a 
while.
  So up goes the Hannah to Providence and reports on how they tricked 
the Gaspee into grounding itself on the sandbar. And, that night, drums 
are beat on the streets of Providence. Refreshments are served. And a 
gang of worthy Rhode Islanders decide to go down and fix the Gaspee, 
once and for all.
  And six or seven longboats rowed down that night, under cover of 
darkness, with muffled oars, and they approached the Gaspee. They told 
its captain to surrender or they would board it and sack it. Captain 
Dudingston said he was not going to do that.
  There was an exchange of gunfire, and the captain of the ship, whose 
actual rank was lieutenant--Lieutenant Dudingston--was shot in that 
exchange. He survived his wounds. He

[[Page S3923]]

was taken ashore by the Rhode Islanders, provided medical care, and 
ended up retiring back to his native Scotland, all well.
  But that moment was probably the first blood drawn in the conflict 
that ultimately became the American Revolution.
  So they did, in fact, take over the boat. They swarmed up the sides 
of it. They captured the crew. They took them all ashore. And then they 
went back out, and they lit the boat on fire.
  Here is a rendition of what the Gaspee looked like burning, stuck on 
the sandbar. Of course, when the fire got to the powder magazine--boom. 
It went off like a bomb. We are still trying to find pieces of the 
Gaspee there, but it got blown to such smithereens that nobody has yet 
been able to find anything, despite some fairly diligent efforts.
  We love the Gaspee in Rhode Island. Here is a new license plate 
commemorating ``Gaspee Days,'' showing the Gaspee all on fire, getting 
ready to blow up.
  And here is what is interesting about it. I did an interview with the 
Washington Post.
  Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the 
Record the interview appended at the end of my remarks here.
  This is from that article.
  Pretty much everybody here--I suspect all of the pages who are here 
on the floor--know exactly what the Boston Tea Party is. Massachusetts 
has seen to it, over many, many years, that everybody knows what the 
Boston Tea Party was.
  Well, as the story relates, 18 months before colonists dumped tea in 
Boston Harbor, Rhode Islanders attacked and destroyed a British Navy 
ship off the coast near Providence, furious with what they saw as the 
Crown's overreach--18 months before.
  You know, in Rhode Island, we sometimes have a little chip on our 
shoulder about being overlooked by our bigger northern neighbor--our 
northern suburbs, some might say. But, you know, when you actually blow 
up the damn boat and that is lost to history, but then up in 
Massachusetts, more than a year later, they push tea bags off the boat 
into the harbor and they get the credit for the great revolutionary 
activity, I want to come to the floor and do my very best to make that 
correction to history.
  And one of the things that is nice is that people are starting to 
write more and more about this.
  I will close by referencing ``The Burning of His Majesty's Schooner 
Gaspee,'' a history of the event surrounding that incident, by Steven 
Park. And then in Nick Bunker's book, ``An Empire on the Edge,'' he has 
an entire chapter inside, ``The dark affair, the Gaspee incident,'' 
that describes what was done.
  And our Secretary of State's office put together this presentation on 
the Gaspee affair. It was titled ``Gaspee: The Spark that Ignited the 
American Revolution.''
  So I am here to commend the Rhode Islanders who struck that spark 18 
months before those Massachusetts worthies drank their share of 
whatever they needed to do to actually get on a boat and push tea bags 
into the harbor--pretty brave. Nothing against them doing that, but--I 
mean, seriously--we captured the boat, we shot the captain, and then we 
blew the damn boat up. I think that merits mention in American history.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

               [From the Washington Post, Dec. 14, 2023]

 Boston Tea Party? Rhode Island Says Its Rebellion Was First--and Just 
                              as Important

                            (By Dan Diamond)

       You'd be forgiven for thinking you know this story.
       American colonists, itching for independence, stormed a 
     British vessel. A spark in New England helped ignite a 
     national revolution.
       But this was not the Boston Tea Party.
       Eighteen months before colonists dumped tea in Boston 
     Harbor--an event that marks its 250th anniversary this week--
     Rhode Islanders attacked and destroyed a British navy ship 
     off the coast near Providence, furious with what they saw as 
     the crown's overreach.
       The burning of the HMS Gaspee on June 10, 1772, was the 
     first major armed act of rebellion by the American colonists, 
     Rhode Island historians and officials maintain. And the 
     resulting fallout--with King George III demanding that the 
     perpetrators be held accountable in a showdown between the 
     colonial legal system and the British courts--helped unify 
     the colonies for the war to come.
       ``[T]his is a Matter in which the whole American Continent 
     is deeply concernd and a Submission of the Colony of Rhode 
     Island to this enormous Claim of power would be made a 
     Precedent for all the rest,'' founding father Samuel Adams 
     wrote to Rhode Island's deputy governor in January 1773.
       But the Gaspee affair, which shook the colonies and rattled 
     the crown, has been largely forgotten outside of Rhode 
     Island. It's been overlooked in U.S. history classes and 
     remains little studied by historians of the American 
     Revolution. The Washington Post reviewed six high school and 
     college U.S. history textbooks and found no mention of the 
     burning of the Gaspee, even as multiple pages were devoted to 
     later--and, in the minds of many Rhode Islanders, lesser--
     events such as the Boston Tea Party.
       ``Nobody knows that well before anybody pushed a tea bag 
     off a civilian ship in the Boston Harbor, Rhode Islanders 
     blew up a military vessel,'' Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) 
     said in a recent interview in his office--sitting in front of 
     a painting that depicts the burning of the Gaspee.
       The senator from Rhode Island has repeatedly given speeches 
     that celebrate the Gaspee raiders, and he's denounced the 
     attention paid to Massachusetts, saying that leaders of his 
     neighboring state have spent centuries spinning their own 
     history.
       ``They got drunk, painted themselves like Indians and 
     pushed tea bags into the Boston Harbor, which we in Rhode 
     Island think is pretty weak tea compared to blowing up the 
     goddamn boat and shooting its captain,'' Whitehouse told The 
     Post. ``But you know, all those Massachusetts people went on 
     to become president and run Harvard . . . so they told their 
     story, and their story, and their story.''
       Rhode Island-based historians agreed that the Gaspee affair 
     is a case study in how important chapters in history become, 
     well, history. The state's own firsts--Rhode Island, for 
     example, was the first colony to declare independence from 
     Britain on May 4, 1776, two months before the other 12 
     colonies--tend to get relegated to footnotes in national 
     stories about the revolution.
       ``So much focus is put into Massachusetts history, and 
     Rhode Island gets overlooked,'' said Kathy Abbass, the 
     principal investigator of the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology 
     Project, which is working to locate the wreckage of the 
     Gaspee off the shore of Warwick, R.I. ``Partly that's because 
     the early histories were written by professors at Harvard and 
     Yale, which set the tone for all the histories that came 
     later.''


                        The attack on the Gaspee

       There's little dispute over the events leading up to the 
     burning of the Gaspee--only how historically significant they 
     were.
       In Rhode Island, as across the colonies, residents were 
     bristling at the taxes, fees and other burdens imposed by a 
     British parliament an ocean away. That parliament, meanwhile, 
     grew frustrated by what leaders saw as Americans' efforts to 
     evade the responsibilities of being part of the British 
     Empire.
       ``The British were trying to raise money by capturing 
     vessels that were sneaking stuff in and not paying duty,'' 
     Abbass said. ``And yes, of course we were smugglers [in Rhode 
     Island]--there's no doubt about that.''
       Commanded by Lieutenant William Dudingston, a Scottish 
     naval officer, the Gaspee sailed into Narragansett Bay in 
     early 1772, seeking to enforce trade laws that the American 
     colonists were increasingly flouting. The British ship began 
     to abruptly board colonial vessels off the coast of Rhode 
     Island and seize their cargo, such as barrels of smuggled 
     rum. Accusations soon proliferated that the Gaspee's crew was 
     stealing sheep and hogs from local farmers, and cutting down 
     their fruit trees for firewood.
       Rhode Islanders compared Dudingston to a pirate, sued him 
     in a local court (which found against him) and even sought 
     his arrest. But the British warned that anyone who attempted 
     to interfere in the Gaspee's work would be executed.
       ``Let them be cautious what they do; for as sure as they 
     attempt it, and any of them are taken, I will hang them as 
     pirates,'' British Adm. John Montagu wrote to Rhode Island's 
     governor in April 1772.
       Then came June 9.
       A small ship called the Hannah, reportedly owned by Rhode 
     Island entrepreneur John Brown, was headed toward Providence. 
     It refused the Gaspee's exhortations to stop--probably 
     because the Hannah carried illegal cargo--and the British 
     gave chase. But the Hannah's captain, a local man named 
     Benjamin Lindsey, knew the area better than Dudingston, and 
     he led the Gaspee into waters that had receded because of the 
     daily tides. The British ship ended up stuck on a sandbar, 
     waiting for the tides to change again hours later.
       The Hannah successfully slipped away to Providence, where 
     Lindsey quickly recounted his tale to Brown, one of the 
     city's leading merchants, who was a member of the loose 
     resistance movement known as the Sons of Liberty and part of 
     the family that helped found Brown University, the Ivy League 
     university that would later bear its name.

[[Page S3924]]

       Brown was also a smuggler--one of Rhode Island's most 
     notorious, Abbass said--and had been nursing a grudge against 
     Dudingston and his ship.
       Learning that the Gaspee was temporarily marooned, ``Mr. 
     Brown immediately resolved on her destruction,'' Ephraim 
     Bowen, a local man who was among the several dozen men who 
     joined Brown, would recount decades later.
       As many as 60 men gathered in the Providence harbor that 
     evening, launching boats and muffling their oars to quietly 
     row out to the Gaspee under cover of darkness. As they 
     approached the ship, a confrontation began--with one of the 
     Gaspee raiders asserting that Dudingston was a criminal who 
     had evaded the local law, Bowen recounted--that led to 
     Dudingston being shot in the groin and arm and all of the 
     ship's crew being taken from the vessel.
       The Rhode Islanders burned the Gaspee to the water line 
     early on the morning of June 10. Then the gunpowder on board 
     exploded, sending pieces of the ship flying.
       As news of the attack made its way to London, British 
     leaders seethed. In a royal proclamation, King George III 
     offered a reward of up to 1,000 pounds sterling--more than 
     $150,000 in today's currency--to anyone who could help 
     identify and convict the ``outrageous and heinous Offenders'' 
     behind the ship's burning. He also established a commission 
     to conduct a formal inquiry, and the British vowed to 
     transport any colonists indicted in the attack to England for 
     trial and, almost certainly, execution.
       But no arrests were ever made. Rhode Islanders refused to 
     volunteer information about the Gaspee raiders, and local 
     officials found ways to slow or stymie the British 
     investigation. Colonial leaders further argued that anyone 
     involved in the Gaspee's burning should face a jury of their 
     peers in America. A Rhode Island sheriff even arrested 
     Dudingston as he recovered from his wounds, charging him for 
     the Gaspee's previous seizures of cargo.
       Meanwhile, the nation's founding fathers exchanged fervent 
     messages about the Gaspee's burning and the British response, 
     setting up the committees of correspondence that helped them 
     coordinate strategies in the years to come.
       Adams, particularly, warned that Britain's determination to 
     pursue the Gaspee affair, and the discussion of the 
     deployment of troops, could lead to a cascade of events that 
     might spark ``a most violent political Earthquake through the 
     whole British Empire if not its total Destruction,'' he wrote 
     in January 1773 to Rhode Island's deputy governor, Darius 
     Sessions.
       ``I have long feard that this unhappy Contest between 
     Britain & America will end in Rivers of Blood,'' Adams wrote.


                 An `uncelebrated burning' is forgotten

       Most of the Rhode Islanders involved in the burning of the 
     Gaspee successfully concealed their identities from the 
     British and even other colonials, helping confound the 
     crown's probe. In some ways, their effort to hide was too 
     successful: Even today, about half the men who burned the 
     Gaspee are unknown.
       But as the American Revolution began to slip out of living 
     memory, Rhode Islanders tried to lay a claim to the first 
     shot fired.
       ``The first blood that was shed in the revolutionary 
     contest, by that very act begun, stained her deck, and it was 
     drawn by a Rhode Island hand,'' William Hunter, a former U.S 
     senator from Rhode Island, said in an address on July 4, 
     1826--50 years after the signing of the Declaration of 
     Independence. ``Yes, the blood of Lieutenant Duddington was 
     the first blood drawn in the American cause.''
       Those efforts to highlight the Gaspee affair had limited 
     success. In the fight over the American legacy, Rhode Island 
     would end up largely nudged to the side--a casualty of a 
     battle between larger states, chiefly Massachusetts and 
     Virginia, that were disproportionately home to some of the 
     era's most influential figures.
       ``There was a very busy group of Boston-based intellectuals 
     who were eager to frame Boston as the driver of the 
     revolution and Bostonians as the inheritors of the legacy of 
     the revolution,'' said Nat Sheidley, a historian who runs 
     Revolutionary Spaces, a Boston-based organization that runs 
     public programs about colonial America--including this week's 
     anniversary of the tea party. He added that America's elite 
     leaders initially downplayed a number of revolutionary 
     events, such as the destruction of tea in Boston's harbor, 
     fearing that it would undermine the sense of order in the 
     young nation.
       ``But by the 1830s, it felt a little bit safer to go 
     there,'' Sheidley said. ``And so that's the moment where . . 
     . the name `Tea Party' is invented, and it becomes 
     popularized as a story of what led us to the revolution.''
       A century later, a 1922 New York Times article detailed 
     ``the uncelebrated burning'' of the Gaspee and asked why the 
     Boston Tea Party had developed a ``much stronger hold'' upon 
     Americans.
       ``[A]s an exhibition of daring the tea party was literally 
     a tea party and nothing more compared with the Gaspee 
     incident,'' Jonathan A. Rawson Jr. wrote in the Times.


                  The Gaspee affair's place in history

       Even today, some historians are largely unfamiliar with the 
     Gaspee or suggest that its burning was a regional matter, The 
     Post found. But in Rhode Island, lore about the Gaspee is 
     thriving. For 57 years, local volunteers have held an annual 
     celebration--known as Gaspee Days--featuring a parade to 
     celebrate the burning of the ship, which is increasingly 
     joined by government officials, reenactors and thousands of 
     residents.
       ``Declare your independence from bank fees!'' reads one ad 
     from a local credit union in last year's 250th anniversary 
     booklet.
       Other efforts abound. Rhode Island's secretary of state 
     offers free Gaspee posters on demand A Brown University 
     instructor created a virtual reality app that allows users to 
     be immersed in a reenactment of the story. A license plate 
     depicting the burning of the Gaspee became available to state 
     drivers this fall--and it looks ``wicked cool,'' said John 
     Concannon, a retired pediatrician who is Gaspee Days' 
     historian.
       It's all part of a larger state goal: to ensure that the 
     burning of the Gaspee is never forgotten again. Historians 
     who have studied the event said that it merits more mention, 
     particularly in textbooks.
       ``The thing about the Gaspee that is important was that the 
     king took notice,'' said Abbass, who has written about other 
     colonial attacks on British vessels that preceded the burning 
     of the Gaspee but provoked negligible reaction from the 
     crown.
       The king's intervention also led to a British attempt to 
     circumvent the colonial courts, causing alarm and ultimately 
     backfiring on the crown, Concannon said. He argued that 
     several articles in the Declaration of Independence, 
     including the right to a jury of one's peers, stem from the 
     Gaspee affair--a more significant contribution to that 
     document than made by the Boston Tea Party, he said.
       That's one reason this weekend's latest celebration of the 
     events in Massachusetts continues to vex Rhode Islanders. 
     When it comes to the founding of America, Concannon said, the 
     burning of the Gaspee is ``just as important.''
       Philip Bump, Azi Paybarah and Dan Lamothe contributed to 
     this report.


                               CORRECTION

       Because of a transcription error, an earlier version of 
     this story initially misquoted Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-
     R.I.) as saying the Boston Tea Party participants ``painted 
     themselves like idiots.'' In fact, he said they ``painted 
     themselves like Indians.'' This version has been corrected.

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. And with that, I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Butler). The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. CASSIDY. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.