The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court

“A damning investigation of dark money by a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.” (Kirkus Reviews) with a new preface on recent disclosures about efforts to influence the Court

“There’s no senator I can think of who’s done more sleuthing to figure out the money trail in American politics, particularly as it affects the courts.”—Jane Mayer, author of the national bestseller Dark Money

As the story breaks of a secretive cabal of extreme religious zealots who waged a stealth campaign to ingratiate themselves with “amenable” Supreme Court justices—who in turn leaked draft decisions to them—the paperback version of The Scheme comes at a time of crisis for the American judiciary.

Following his book Captured on corporate capture of regulatory and government agencies, and his years of experience as a prosecutor, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, called “a powerful voice in defending our American democracy against the relentless, pervasive—and often hidden—power of corporate special interests” by Senator Elizabeth Warren, here turns his attention to the right-wing scheme to capture the United States Supreme Court. Whitehouse chronicles a hidden-money campaign using an armada of front groups, helped by the infamous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, using the Federalist Society as an appointments turnstile, and with the same small handful of right-wing billionaires and corporations enticing the Senate to break rules, norms, and precedents to confirm wildly inappropriate nominees who would advance the anti-government agenda of a small number of corporate oligarchs. Every indication is that the justices’ assurances were knowingly and strategically false, cover for the day when—like sleeper agents—they would number a majority and could act on their real intentions.

Now available in an affordable paperback edition with a new preface addressing the Reverend Schenck disclosures about politicking the justices and Justice Thomas’s recently disclosed conflicts of interest, The Scheme offers what Kirkus Reviews calls “a maddening indictment of a corrupt and corrupted judiciary.”