Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse just led 90 members of Congress in filing an amicus brief with the Supreme Court arguing that states and localities should be able to sue oil and gas companies for climate-related damages. The case is Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, and Whitehouse's brief accuses fossil fuel companies of deceptive marketing.
What the brief doesn't mention is who's been funding the senator's campaigns.
The law firm spearheading the climate litigation campaign — Sher Edling LLP — has deep financial ties to Whitehouse that he has never disclosed in his amicus filings. Victor Sher and Matt Edling, the firm's co-founders, began making thousand-dollar donations to Whitehouse's campaigns in late 2016. By July 2018, Whitehouse was standing next to Rhode Island's attorney general announcing that Sher Edling would represent the state in a climate lawsuit against energy producers. By January 2019, he was filing amicus briefs supporting Sher Edling's California plaintiffs in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board flagged the arrangement back in March 2019, noting that Whitehouse "did not disclose that he has received donations from two parties in the litigation." That was seven years ago. He's still doing it.
The August 3 brief in the Boulder County case follows the same playbook. Whitehouse and Rep. Pramila Jayapal led the filing, which argues that the Clean Air Act, the Constitution, and federal foreign policy do not prevent state-level climate lawsuits — exactly the legal position that would keep Sher Edling's cases alive and its lawyers in line for what could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars in contingency fees.
Whitehouse has spent years demanding that entities filing amicus briefs in climate cases disclose their donors. "We need more transparency so the public, the parties and the Justices can identify bias and conflicts of interest," he once wrote. Those are his words. Applied to everyone except himself, apparently.
O.H. Skinner, the former Arizona Solicitor General and executive director of the Alliance for Consumers, reviewed the 28 amicus briefs filed in support of Boulder County and concluded that they "basically confirm" the lawsuit "is an ideologically driven, dark money-funded attempt to impose a left wing set of policies on the country using the courtroom." Skinner identified Sher Edling as being funded by the Tides Foundation and the Arabella Advisors network — two of the largest liberal dark-money operations in the country.
"When you look at these cases and you see that the main law firm pushing the case is being funded by giant pools of liberal dark money," Skinner told The Center Square, it "further confirms that this is about ideological lawfare."
This is a senator who has made dark money his signature issue. He's given floor speeches about it. He's written reports about it. He's demanded Supreme Court reform over it. And the entire time, the law firm bankrolling the litigation he champions has been writing checks to his campaign.
Whitehouse didn't invent the conflict of interest. He just perfected the art of lecturing everyone else about theirs while pretending his doesn't exist.