Last night, during the debate to confirm racist Alabama Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions to be US Attorney General, the good Democratic senator from Massachusetts and former Harvard law professor, Elizabeth Warren was silenced when she started reading the late Coretta Scott King letter that opposed Sessions nomination to the federal court.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) led a party-line rebuke Tuesday night of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for her speech opposing attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions, striking down her words for impugning the Alabama senator’s character.
In an extraordinarily rare move, McConnell interrupted Warren’s speech, in a near-empty chamber as the nomination debate heads toward a Wednesday evening vote, and said that she had breached Senate rules by reading past statements against Sessions from figures such as the late senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and the late Coretta Scott King.
“The senator has impugned the motives and conduct of our colleague from Alabama,” McConnell said, then setting up a series of roll-call votes on Warren’s conduct. [..]
McConnell specifically cited portions of a letter that King, the widow of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., wrote to the Senate Judiciary Committee in opposition to Sessions’s 1986 nomination to be a federal judge.
The letter by the widow of the late Martin Luther King, Jr had already been entered into the congressional record. Mr. McConnell’s objection and the Republican rebuke, under rule 19, was purely racist.
The premise of that letter still holds. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions is a racist and should not be appointed to any high office in the US government. It’s bad enough he’s in the Senate.
The full 10 page letter by Mrs. King to Sen. Strom Thurmond can be read here.
The Senate Republicans didn’t just tried to silence Sen. Warren, they tried to silence Mrs. King. They handed her a sword.
But in true form of the resistance, Sen. Warren went to a quiet space outside the Senate and recorded the read Mrs. King’s letter. She then posted it to her facebook page and other posted it to YouTube. May it go viral.
#ShePersisted. #Resist
1 comments
And Sexist. Over a dozen male Democratic Senators read exactly the same letter, some without any ommission or elision.
Only Warren was censured. McConnell now claims it was the “context” of her previous 45 minutes of presentation.