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Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I wanted to come to the floor and kick off the process that will culminate tomorrow with our vote on the DISCLOSE Act.

The DISCLOSE Act will get rid of dark money in our politics. President Biden gave a good speech about it yesterday to help stir interests and progress in this area.

There are problems with dark money in and of itself. It contributes to what has been called the tsunami of slime in our politics, because when the slimy ad has a fake, phony front group's name on it and no actual real entity or company or association is accountable for that, well, then you can lie to your heart's content, you can smear to your heart's content, and there is no accountability.

So there are reasons for getting dark money out of our elections on their own: just giving disproportionate power to special interests, sliming up our elections, allowing a lot of bad actors powers that they don't deserve, and putting enormous power in the hands of people who are, A, politically active enough to be willing to spend that kind of money and have a motive in legislative outcomes to spend that kind of money that regular citizens can't begin to match.

But there is a lot more to it than that. There is a lot more to it than that, because, like corruption, dark money is used to achieve other goals. And those other goals have had very important policy effects in our country.

Climate change we are dealing with daily now in floods, in fires, in droughts, in species moving about--particularly in Rhode Island, our ocean fisheries are moving about. The oceans are acidifying. We are putting essential operating systems of our planet in danger and onto a course that mankind has never seen before in the entire history of humankind.

When I got here in 2007, this was addressed as a bipartisan problem. There were three different bipartisan Senate bills, all of which were very consequential. It would have made a huge difference. Senator McCain ran for President carrying the Republican Party banner with a significant and serious climate platform, and it looked like democracy was responding to this problem in a responsible way. All of that activity came to an instant shuttering halt in January of 2010.

What happened in January of 2010? What happened in January of 2010 was that the U.S. Supreme Court let loose one of the worst decisions it has ever rendered--the Citizens United decision--and that decision allowed unlimited money to flow into politics.

Of course, if you can spend unlimited money in politics, you suddenly have an unprecedented motive to hide it. If the most you can give is $3,500 or $5,000 from your PAC, it is not worth putting a lot of effort into hiding that; plus, nobody really cares. But if you can give $35 million, plus, let's say you are a polluting fossil fuel company and you don't want people to know that, now it is worth putting quite a lot of money into the apparatus of hiding who you are. It is an expensive apparatus. It is a real apparatus. Senators have gone to the floor before to describe it. We have used this graphic.

This is the web of climate denial that has been chronicled by scientists who study as a phenomenon climate denial and how the money flies around through these different groups and how they use it to hide what they are doing on climate.

Well, once that got launched, that was the end of bipartisanship on climate. We lost a decade. I think history will show that the lost decade from January 2010 until now is one that these pages and children across the country will pay a very steep price for.

Why would they be willing to do it? Well, the fossil fuel industry has an annual subsidy of $660 billion, basically, from being allowed to pollute for free--$660 billion.

If you are protecting a $660 billion subsidy, how much would you be willing to spend any given year to protect it? If you spent $6.6 billion a year, you would still be earning 100 times your investment. Sure enough, we have seen dark money explode into expenditures by the billion. And as that happened, climate progress ended.

Look at voter suppression. Across the country, there was a wave of Republican State legislatures passing voter suppression laws. Was it an amazing coincidence that they all happened to do that at the same time? Evidently not, because there is actually a tape from Heritage Action-- one of the dark money groups behind those voter suppression campaigns-- where the person briefing the big donors admitted this:

We're working with these state legislators . . . in some cases we actually draft [the bills] for them or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, you know, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.

The whole thing was a dark money fake fed into these State legislatures by dark money and no small amount.

This is a $24 million investment--

The speaker said--

We . . . started . . . right after the November election. . . . we've driven hundreds of 1000s of calls, emails, placed letters to the editor, hosted events, and run television and digital ads.

So voter suppression is an artifact of dark money.

And, last, Court capture. I have got a series of speeches that I have given so far--18 of them. When I do, I put my ``Scheme'' poster up because this was a scheme; indeed, a scheme and a half.

At this point, what we know is that at least $580 million was spent on phony front groups using dark money out to capture the Court. We don't know how much additionally went into political coffers to reward people for their Court-packing enterprise or to threaten to punish people if they didn't go along with the Court-packing enterprise, but it was quite a show.

This is just one little node of that $580 million Court capture enterprise. It shows two groups, which is the current, sort of, best practices--worst practices, better to say--in political influence. You have a 501(c)3 and a 501(c)4 side by side, same location, same staff, indistinguishable in any real sense. And then in this case, they pushed what they called fictitious names so that their phony front groups had phony front groups that had names like Judicial Education Project and Honest Elections Project Action. But here is one that was somewhat significant, the Judicial Crisis Network, because Judicial Crisis Network took $15 million checks, $17 million checks and turned that money to TV ads to stop the confirmation of Justice Garland and to push through the confirmation of Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. So dark money flows into all these other areas.

If you like climate denial, you love dark money. If you like voters having their votes suppressed by partisan legislators, you love dark money. And if you like a captured Court that dances to the tune of the dark money donors who stocked it, you love dark money. And that is before we even get to its pernicious, insidious, clandestine effect in our elections.

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