Senator Whitehouse has a new book out this week

The cover of "The Scheme," a new book by US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.THE NEW PRESS

If you want to give US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse a birthday gift (he turns 67 today), you might want consider buying his new book.

Rhode Island’s junior senator is out this week with “The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court,” where he and co-author Jennifer Mueller go deep on what they consider “a decades-long, behind-the-scenes manipulation of our political and justice systems to capture our courts – specifically the Supreme Court – as a way to control the future of our democracy.”

Whitehouse has long been tracing the corporate money that he believes has too much influence over politics in general, and the courts specifically, and he writes that the goals of the book “are to create a historical record of what’s gone haywire, to issue a wake-up call about the sordid role of dark money in our courts and our democracy, and to make the case that the situation merits alarm and correction.”

The book probably isn’t going to be on the top of any Republican’s Christmas list, and The Wall Street Journal is unlikely to offer a loving review, but Whitehouse doesn’t spare some of his own allies, either. He’s critical of the Obama administration’s general avoidance of climate change during his first term in office, for example.

Whitehouse is off to a good start with the book. As of this morning, it was No. 51 on Amazon’s best-seller list. It’s also the second book from a member of Rhode Island’s four-member delegation this year. US Representative David Cicilline released “House on Fire” in August.

This story first appeared in Rhode Map, our free newsletter about Rhode Island that also contains information about local events, data about the coronavirus in the state, and more. If you’d like to receive it via e-mail Monday through Friday, you can sign up here.