by Melissa Quinn
| August 19, 2019 12:59 PM
| Updated Aug 19, 2019, 05:07 PM
A nonprofit legal group has filed a complaint with the Rhode Island Supreme Court against Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse over a controversial brief that he and four other Democratic senators filed which some viewed as an attempt to bully the U.S. Supreme Court.
Judicial Watch accused the Rhode Islander of practicing law without proper authorization when he filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the nation’s highest court in a gun case from New York.
As an inactive member of his state's bar, Whitehouse cannot practice in the state, but Judicial Watch said he did so in filing the document on behalf of Democratic Sens. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Dick Durbin of Illinois and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. The conservative group also notes Whitehouse is not a member of the District of Columbia bar. But the Rhode Island Democrat is a member of the Supreme Court bar, his office said.
“The filing of a brief — let alone all that is required to file a brief — on behalf of clients is indisputably the practice of law,” Judicial Watch claimed.
The conservative group further lambasted the filing from Whitehouse as “unbecoming of the legal profession as it is nothing more than an attack on the federal judiciary and an open threat to the U.S. Supreme Court” and accused the Democratic senator of violating the Rhode Island Rules of Professional Conduct.
“Senator Whitehouse’s assertion, without basis, that the court does not rule on the merits of cases but rather on partisan beliefs undermines confidence in the legal system,” Judicial Watch wrote in its complaint. “It is one thing for a politician to make such a claim on the campaign trail, it is another for a lawyer to make such a charge as part of a legal proceeding.”
The brief was filed in a case challenging restrictions on where licensed gun owners in New York City can transport their unloaded and locked handguns. The Supreme Court accepted the case in January, making it the first Second Amendment dispute the justices agreed to hear since 2010. But in the intervening months, New York City officials asked the high court to drop the case after it eased the restrictions at issue.
Whitehouse, listed on the brief as the counsel of record, and his fellow Democratic senators urged the court to dismiss the case or risk public backlash.
“The Supreme Court is not well,” the brief reads. “And the people know it. Perhaps the court can heal itself before the public demands it be ‘restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics.’ Particularly on the urgent issue of gun control, a nation desperately needs it to heal.”
The Democratic senators also excoriated the National Rifle Association and The Federalist Society, a conservative legal group, and suggested the Supreme Court’s conservative justices, who hold a 5-4 majority, were beholden to those organizations because of their political influence.
“Out in the real world, Americans are murdered each day with firearms in classrooms or movie theaters or churches or city streets, and a generation of preschoolers is being trained in active-shooter survival drills,” the senators wrote. “In the cloistered confines of this court, and notwithstanding the public imperatives of these massacres, the NRA and its allies brashly presume, in word and deed, that they have a friend audience for their project.’”
Whitehouse’s brief has been cheered by some liberal judicial advocacy groups as a necessary warning to the Supreme Court’s new conservative majority, but others argue the senators’ brief serves as a not-so-veiled threat to the high court.
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