Sheldon Whitehouse
For more than 20 years, Sheldon Whitehouse has served the people of Rhode Island: championing health care reform, standing up for our environment, helping solve fiscal crises, and investigating public corruption. Now, his experience as a seasoned prosecutor and policymaker is at work for Rhode Island in the U.S. Senate, where Sheldon’s 2006 election helped bring new leadership to Congress and set our country on a different course.
Whitehouse has made reforming our broken health care system a hallmark of his career. He founded the Rhode Island Quality Institute, a collaborative effort between health care providers, insurers, and government that has pioneered efforts to expand the use of electronic prescriptions and improve the quality of care delivered in the state’s intensive care units. In the Senate, Whitehouse made health care reform the subject of the first three pieces of legislation he introduced since taking office. This trio of bills is aimed at encouraging health quality reforms, building a national health IT infrastructure, and linking health care payments to health care quality. He has held dozens of meetings with health care leaders and advocacy organizations, in Rhode Island and nationwide, to build consensus on health care reform.
Whitehouse has long been an advocate for environmental protection, health, and conservation. He has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court to protect public wetlands from development; sued to block Bush administration efforts to weaken the Clean Air Act; and led the investigation into a devastating oil spill in Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay. Whitehouse also launched the first-ever attempt by a state to hold paint manufacturers responsible for allowing toxic levels of lead to accumulate in Rhode Island homes, a public health crisis that has poisoned more than 37,000 children in the state. In the Senate, he has introduced measures that would help wildlife populations and coastal communities adjust to global warming, and cosponsored aggressive legislation to significantly reduce global warming pollutants. As a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee, he has also helped lead the Committee’s investigation into political interference at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Bush Administration.
A former United States Attorney for Rhode Island, Senator Whitehouse played a notable role in the Senate Judiciary Committee investigation into the Bush Administration’s unprecedented firings of federal prosecutors. Whitehouse cosponsored successful legislation to restore the Senate’s role in the confirmation of nominees for U.S. Attorney vacancies and introduced a bill to restore safeguards against political interference at the Department of Justice, a policy change ultimately adopted by then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey. He also worked to expand privacy protections in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), strengthening limits on when the government can spy on Americans. Proposals Whitehouse cosponsored to prohibit the government from using torture and secret detentions were adopted by President Barack Obama in one of his first acts in office.
A graduate of Yale University and the University of Virginia School of Law, Whitehouse served as a policy advisor and counsel in the Office of the Governor of Rhode Island and as the state’s Director of Business Regulation before being nominated by President Bill Clinton to be Rhode Island's U.S. Attorney in 1994. He was elected State Attorney General in 1998, a position in which he served from 1999-2003. On November 7, 2006, Rhode Islanders elected Whitehouse to the Senate, where he is a member of the Special Committee on Aging and the Budget Committee, the Environment and Public Works Committee, the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, the Judiciary Committee, and the Select Committee on Intelligence. He chairs the Judiciary Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts and the EPW Subcommittee on Oversight.He lives in Newport with his wife, Sandra, a marine biologist and environmental advocate, and their two children.