Political Quotes

“Mr. President, with my distinguished colleague from Utah here, I would just--before I get to my remarks--suggest that there may be an exception to his rule that when a piece of legislation is only sponsored by Members of one party it can't be serious legislation; and, in my view, that would include climate legislation, where it has been extremely hard to get Republicans to cosponsor any serious climate bill. And I think that has nothing to do with the seriousness of the legislation and everything to do with the influence of the fossil fuel industry. But that said, Mr. President, I am here to speak for the 11th time in my series discussing the scheme through which a bunch of big, anonymous donors captured our Supreme Court. Today, I am going to talk about the Biden Supreme Court commission, which could have done a useful, even authoritative investigation of the scheme and all its terrible effects at the Court but which, regrettably, ended up as an exercise in ineffectual time-killing. I have laid out the scheme in detail in earlier speeches in this series. In a nutshell, there is a very well-studied phenomenon of regulatory capture, sometimes called agency capture, through which big industries try to capture and control the regulatory agencies that are supposed to be policing them. Well, in the same way, big, rightwing donor interests set out to capture the Supreme Court. And they did it. It worked.…”