With the possible exception of Arkansas’s John Boozman, the best name in the U.S. Senate belongs to Sheldon Whitehouse. There simply isn’t another member of the upper chamber whose name rolls off the tongue as smoothly and sweetly, or that conjures up such images of competence, sobriety, and dignity. Put simply, if Mitt Romney looks like a president, “Sheldon Whitehouse” sounds like a president.

Unfortunately for the Rhode Island Democrat, that’s as far as the comparison goes. When it comes to the important work of the Senate, Whitehouse is all hat and no cattle, and his colleagues know it. As we’ve documented before, he’s a hard-left hater of the First and Second Amendments, he routinely ascribes ill will to his Republican opposition, and he’s inclined to invoke the RICO statute on those who wonder whether global warming climate change is every bit the existential threat that he thinks it is. His infamous 2018 exchange with then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh showed the rest of the world just how unserious the senator with the serious-sounding name is:

Worse yet, but not at all surprising, Whitehouse is a hypocrite with a clear-cut preference for racial homogeneity. “As the nation prepared to celebrate Juneteenth and the end of slavery in America,” writes Andrew Stiles in the Washington Free Beacon, “at least one Democrat was pushing back against his party’s woke obsession with racial equity.”

That one anti-equity Democrat would be Whitehouse, whose been dragging his feet for years about his membership in an all-white beach club in the elite oceanside town of Newport. Last week, a local reporter finally caught up with him to inquire about his progress toward integrating Bailey’s Beach Club — a promise he’d made back in 2017 after having pledged to cancel his club membership 11 years before that. It didn’t go well:

“I think the people who are running the place are still working on that,” said the senator, “and I’m sorry it hasn’t happened yet.” But not to worry, he says, such clubs have “a long tradition in Rhode Island.”

Suffice it to say, Whitehouse’s word appears to be nearabout worthless, and he appears to be about as influential with his fellow lily-white beach-clubbers as he is with his senatorial colleagues. As Stiles put it, “Opponents of white supremacy will have to pry his Bailey’s membership from his cold dead hands.”

All this is of a piece, though, with the Democrat Party’s free pass on issues of race. Were Whitehouse a Republican, his Senate colleagues would be holding hearings by now. As commentator Lisa Boothe quipped, “Whitehouse is a member of a whites-only beach club, the Gov of Virginia either wore black face or a Ku Klux Klan robe, and Joe Biden said he didn’t want his kids to grow up in a racial jungle. But Democrats want to lecture about racism in America.”

That pretty much sums things up.

Update: One would think that a Senate Democrat’s membership in an all-white beach club would merit some sort of response from his colleagues on the Left. But one would be wrong. As the Washington Free Beacon reports, the silence is deafening.