Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell dusted off a seldom-used and selectively enforced Section 2 of Rule 19 to stop Senator Elizabeth Warren from speaking in opposition to the confirmation of Senator Jeff Sessions to be the next Attorney General.
“2. No Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.”
What prompted the Majority Leader and Turtle-in-Chief to rise from his slumber and effectively censor a fellow senator’s speech?
Senator Warren was reading a 30 year-old letter written by Coretta Scott King (widow of Martin Luther King, Jr whom I’d imagine should be familiar even to Mitch McConnell!) opposing the confirmation of Senator Sessions to a Federal judgeship on the basis that as US Attorney, Senator Sessions had engaged in behaviours and politically motivated prosecutions against African-Americans trying to exercise their right to vote.
Wow.
To be honest, I’m a bit mystified how Senator Warren’s reading of a letter that was accepted as part of the official record of that confirmation hearing comes anywhere near to violating Rule 19 when you have the case of Senator Ted Cruz flat-out calling the Majority Leader a liar on the Senate floor and absolutely nothing was done about it.
And especially when the letter actually supports the point that a lot of people are quite uneasy about this particular nomination of a man who has a record of being hostile to civil rights activists which would have been bad enough as a Federal judge but would be catastrophically worse as the person responsible for defending and enforcing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. One might just be inclined to question just how vigourous a defence might be on offer when one’s actions over their career is taken into account.
What a surreal world we find ourselves living in: a Southern senator from Kentucky essentially ruled that another Senator cannot use the testimony of the wife of a civil rights icon which was accepted into evidence and is part of the Senate’s official record to support her argument that the nominee for Attorney General of the United States (another Southerner) has a questionable record on civil rights.
And all of this during Black History Month, no less!
Is it Senate Majority Leader McConnell…or should he change his name to Custer for breathtaking stupidity and seeming unawareness of just how this might play out in the media?