The woke libs are at it again: trying to neutralize the Supreme Court, and especially Justice Thomas, because they realize that they may not have the power to change its composition for years.

What must really rankle is that they created this “problem” themselves. It was the libs in the Senate who, when they were in the majority, outvoted Republicans in order to do away with the filibuster so they could confirm a few judges to the federal appeals courts. When the Republicans got back in the majority, they did the same to the filibuster for Supreme Court Justices, which meant Democrats were no longer able to block President Trump’s nominees to the Supreme Court. And so he put three conservatives into those lifetime positions. Ha! Sauce for the goose and all that.

Back in 2022, this column reported on the ongoing Democrat attack on the Supreme Court. That attack continues. President Biden recently announced formally in an op-ed in the Washington Post a plan to make fundamental changes to the Supreme Court, primarily imposing term limits for the justices and establishing an enforceable ethics code. (That’s not going to happen; it would take a constitutional amendment.)

Whether the impetus came from the administration or from congressional Democrats who have been waging war on the Court is not known. But the war has been very public and should remind Republicans how Democrats operate and encourage them to think of how to fight fire with fire. Republicans should start their own war. That war doesn’t have to be symmetrical.

As this column noted in 2022, the late M. Stanton Evans described the left’s drill for dealing with certain issues: (a) create a scare about some “menace”; (b) reference “studies” or “science” or “experts” that laymen can’t possibly understand or check; (c) get your guys to hammer the issue relentlessly; and finally, when the public “understands” the problem and “knows” it has to be dealt with, (d) move to do whatever was desired to begin with.

That’s what the left libs have been doing with the Supreme Court, which has included, most publicly, waging war on Clarence Thomas. Recently, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) filed articles of impeachment against both Justices Thomas and Alito. And Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) have asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to open a federal investigation into Justice Thomas’s actions. But the leader of the pack seems to be Senator Whitehouse. Why he is so interested is anyone’s guess.

The attacks have gone on for several years and have culminated in Biden’s proposal, which isn’t going anywhere (of course!). But it isn’t designed to. Rather, it’s a campaign ploy to take attention off Kamala Harris’s dreadful record.

Because Sen. Whitehouse seems to be the point man for this operation, he should be the focus of conservatives’ attention. They should attack him mercilessly.

In July, the Washington Examiner ran a piece questioning Whitehouse’s purchase of shares of Goldman Sachs—$15,000 worth of shares! This column can now also reveal the senator has as much as $250,000 in shares and also Goldman Sachs mutual funds—and (stop the presses) his wife also owns shares in Goldman. Tricky? Perhaps flagrantly dishonest.

This is the stuff of scandal! (It is also the stuff of a very ordinary financial report the senator is supposed to file annually—but never mind that.)

Where does Whitehouse live? What’s that house worth? Does he have a summer house? This column knows (as, er, does anyone else who has access to the Social Register) that he has a house in Newport, Rhode Island, where the ultra-swells live.

But wait! There’s more! Are you sitting down? Whitehouse belongs to a club there that has very few blacks! This column covered that scandal here.

Ah ha! We have a beginning. We have a menace: (1) a rich, (2) white guy (3) beating up on a black man—who just happens to be a Supreme Court Justice. And not just any white man beating up on a black man, but (4) a rich perpetrator who belongs to a club that excludes blacks. If that isn’t a scandal, what is?

Somewhere, there’s bound to be a study indicating that people who belong to segregated clubs don’t like blacks. We need to find it.

This is beginning to look like curtains for Sen. Whitehouse.

But it’s only a beginning. It must be hammered monthly into shape.

In 2018, the website Energy Depth reported that “in 1999, when he was the state’s attorney general, Whitehouse pursued a public nuisance claim against paint companies in the Ocean State. The case bounced around multiple courtrooms, but on July 1, 2008—almost ten years ago exactly—the Rhode Island Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s ruling and dismissed the case, asserting the state [i.e., Whitehouse] had stretched “the law of public nuisance beyond reasonable bounds.”

That’s it! We need to know what investments Whitehouse made in the paint companies. Was he buying? Selling? Shorting? Can we possibly know without an investigation? A public hearing? What did Whitehouse know about paint, and when did he know it?

Where did his children go to college? One went to Brown—BROWN!—wow! And one went to Yale—YALE!! Double wow! How did they get in? Two children in Ivy League colleges. C’mon. What are the odds? People have gone to jail for engaging in what is essentially bribery in order to get their children into good colleges.

What did Whitehouse do to get them in? What strings did he pull? Demand to see their transcripts. (That, of course, is an outrageous request—which is just the point.)

As can plainly be seen, there’s enough material here for a few senators to get up monthly and rail against Whitehouse’s behavior. Rail against a different “outrageous action” each time.

Monthly. That means every month explaining what happened and asking how it could possibly have happened without some high-level skullduggery.

Then come the calls for an investigation. And then for Whitehouse’s resignation.

That’s the way the Democrats do it. Republicans have to be even more effective. And if they are, maybe, just maybe, the Democrats will stop playing that game. But they need to lose a few rounds first.

As Whitehouse’s public career now starts to draw to a close, we can feel a bit sorry for this fallen man, remembering that none of us is perfect. We are all human.

Soon it will be: exit Whitehouse, a sadder but wiser man. Maybe he can get a job teaching con law in a community college in Appalachia, where news of his scandalous behavior may be slow to arrive. Sad when you think of it. He had such promise, even though he also went to Yale . . .

The Supreme Court will be saved. And Justice Thomas can relax.

Full disclosure: I know Senator Whitehouse, and members of my family have known members of his family for four generations. I have no doubt whatsoever about his integrity—as I have no doubt whatsoever about the integrity of Justice Thomas, although I have known him for only 43 years.

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Daniel Oliver is Chairman of the Board of the Education and Research Institute and a Director of Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco. In addition to serving as Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Reagan, he was Executive Editor and subsequently Chairman of the Board of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.

Email Daniel Oliver at Daniel.Oliver@TheCandidAmerican.com.