When Sheldon Whitehouse won his election to the U.S. Senate from Rhode Island, I was hopeful that his being such a caricature of the rich New England liberal would leave him vulnerable to future challenge from a down-to-earth regular-guy/gal candidate with common-sense conservative ideas and values.  That has yet to be tested, but Whitehouse’s status as far-left commentator Rachel Maddow’s “political crush” suggests that he’s been working to make my reasoning more plausible, not less.

And now, there he is, the name that Bradley Smith plucks, in a Wall Street Journal essay, from the vast selection of the federal government, as the face for a willingness to bring fundamental political corruption to the IRS for partisan advantage:

Why is the IRS regulating political activity at all?

The answer is that many Democratic politicians and progressive activists think new rules limiting political speech by nonprofits will benefit Democrats politically. …

Nobody will admit that the goal is to hamper the political opposition. To make the case for IRS regulation of politics, these progressives, such as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) and the Campaign Legal Center, have promulgated three myths.

The irony is that, throughout the secondary-school and college courses designed to convince me that liberal policies were not only more intelligent, but also more moral, because supportive of The People, was a repeated sneer against “aristocrats.”  Well, here you go, folks: an actual aristocrat who wants to make it more difficult for The People to organize in support of their own views, if their own views conflict with his.