The ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee may have greased the skids for million in grants to his wife’s employer.

We already knew quite a lot about Sheldon Whitehouse, his campaign against the independent judiciary, and his efforts to posture as some sort of “ethics” watchdog for the courts. We knew that Whitehouse is the Senate’s leading conspiracy theorist, who threatens judges in the hopes of influencing their decisions and never lets the facts get in his way. We knew that he can’t do math. We knew that when Democrats are in power, he calls for governing by “executive Beast Mode.” We knew that he has pressured the supposedly nonpartisan Judicial Conference’s Advisory Committee on Appellate Rules into trying to smuggle his legislation into the federal rules when it wouldn’t pass Congress. We knew that he used government power to pressure social media companies into censoring his political opponents. We knew that he argues that it is unethical for sitting judges to answer questions that he poses to them. We knew that he tried to stop the Supreme Court from protecting free speech from Kamala Harris and Xavier Becerra. We knew that he was hysterical and dead wrong about how Justice Amy Coney Barrett would rule in a challenge to Obamacare. We knew that he tried to urge Merrick Garland to launch a bogus investigation of Justice Clarence Thomas.

We also knew that Whitehouse has been all too cozy with using his office to benefit his wife. Now, we have more meat on the bones of that charge, after a watchdog group, the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, filed an ethics complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee over $6.9 million in grants to Ocean Conservancy, an environmentalist group that employs his wife Sandra and “has paid Sandra Whitehouse $2.6 million directly or through her consulting firm since 2010.” Nice work, if you can get it. Whitehouse has long been criticized for voting in favor of bills pushed by the Ocean Conservancy, which doesn’t look great but is the sort of synergy between an activist spouse and a public official that is not formally unethical. But as ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Whitehouse is well positioned to help his wife’s benefactor get funded — to the couple’s own financial benefit — and Ocean Conservancy has made out well:

Ocean Conservancy has received more than $14 million from 19 government grants dating back to 2008, with almost half that money coming in the past year. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration gave Ocean Conservancy a $5.2 million grant in September for marine debris cleanup with funds allocated from the bipartisan infrastructure law former President Joe Biden signed in 2021.

Ocean Conservancy received another $1.7 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency in December with congressionally appropriated funds. Senator Whitehouse voted for both pieces of legislation along with many of his Democratic colleagues and some Republicans.

The complaint notes: “Ocean Conservancy also advocated and secured billions in funding for coastal restoration projects in the Inflation Reduction Act. Senator Whitehouse not only voted for that legislation, but touted $3 billion in grant funding for ports and coastal restoration among the ‘Whitehouse-backed measures in the bill.’”

The ethical standards for legislators are different from those that apply to judges. Sometimes, they’re more lenient: we don’t expect politicians to pretend to be impartial, or to avoid statements on public controversies, or to keep their distance from partisan politics. We expect them, even, to give a certain amount of preferential treatment to their own constituents. But, in other ways, the financial interests of politicians are potentially more problematic: judges can recuse themselves from particular lawsuits that may directly affect their families or their sources of income, but politicians have far more broad-ranging influence, and they rarely recuse themselves from anything and often can’t. Presidents can’t just withdraw from all controversies involving a major foreign nation. Senators can’t just back out of voting on the budget. The Biden family ethics morass was so bad because it was naked influence-peddling involving an office with influence that is too broad and multifarious to trace. The same is true of Trump family influence, which is less egregious (the Trumps at least have legitimate, preexisting businesses such as hotels and resorts that can be patronized by foreign governments as by private customers) but still a genuine problem.

In Whitehouse’s case, greasing the skids for millions in public money to go to a nongovernmental entity that sends millions to his wife? That, at a minimum, suggests that he ought to get his own house in order before blathering about anyone else’s ethics.