Sheldon Whitehouse: “the subject of our colloquy is going to be the enormous, secret gifts that have recently been disclosed going into the…”

“the subject of our colloquy is going to be the enormous, secret gifts that have recently been disclosed going into the pockets of certain Supreme Court Justices. The first thing that is remarkable about these gifts is how magnificent they are--luxury trips on private jets, luxury trips on superyachts, paying for a Justice's mother's home, paying for private school tuition of dependents, $500,000 donations to organizations that the spouse worked for, $25,000 fees into a spouse's consulting firm, jet and fishing trips across the country. So it is all pretty rich stuff. In Rhode Island, if you want to take a gift from somebody--let's say you are a municipal employee, and they want to take you to lunch across the street from city hall. It is 25 bucks. That is your limit, and you have to disclose it. You get to do that three times, and then you are all done. Then you can't even take the $25 lunch if you disclose it. So in Rhode Island, people are really upset about these multi-hundred- thousand-dollar gifts. It gets worse. It is not just the size of the gifts. It is the network. It is the web. The billionaires who are involved in giving these gifts overlap with an array of front groups that are involved with the billionaires and with the gifts, and there is a common ``fixer'' who ties many of these threads together. The trips very often involve the fixer and the Justices and the billionaires, and the whole mess is interwoven.…”