The rebuke of Warren came after the Massachusetts Democrat read a letter written 30 years ago by Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr., opposing the nomination of Jeff Sessions for a federal judgeship.
Warren cited the letter during a debate on the nomination of Sessions — now an Alabama senator — as Donald Trump’s attorney general. Reading from King’s letter to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1986, Warren said: ‘Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as a federal judge.’
(CNN, February 8, 2017)
The US Senate is generally recognized as the world’s most-deliberative body. Therefore, imagine what this rebuke portends for political debate.
It is worth stressing that Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts was merely delineating the reasons Sessions is unfit to serve as attorney general. And she was elevating this debate by using the words of no less an authority than Coretta Scott King to make her case.
Therefore, by interrupting her, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell betrayed not only his political tin ear but also Sessions’s consciousness of guilt. Reports are that Sessions is very sensitive about any airing of the racist stains in his record of public service – as well he should be.
Evidently to spare him further embarrassment, McConnell cited an arcane rule that prohibits impugning the character of a fellow senator. He then moved the Senate to rebuke Warren with this patently sexist (not to mention patronizing and demonstrably hypocritical) riff, which is now trending as a feminist clarion call:
She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.
Except that, far from sparing Sessions any embarrassment, McConnell ended up magnifying it exponentially. Because, had he left well enough alone, Warren’s speech would have soon been relegated to the C-SPAN archives, having been viewed by no more than a few thousand political junkies — like me.
Instead, after he forced her off the Senate floor, Warren shrewdly took to Facebook to livestream her reading of Coretta Scott King’s indictment, which as of this writing has received over five million views.
Incidentally, he also ended up burnishing Warren’s bona fides as a progressive folk hero. Not to mention imbuing her with irreproachable authority to serve as the bane not only of Trump’s presidency but of Sessions’s tenure as attorney general to boot.
Of course, McConnell’s own record of public service should have given him pause. For it is such that he could also have been motivated as much by a racist attempt to put the black civil rights matriarch “in her place” as by a sexist attempt to put this white progressive “president-in-waiting” in hers.
Whatever the case, this is easily the most ill-fated rebuke (a Republican homage to Black History Month?) since Alabama Governor George Wallace intoned the following in 1963:
Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!
Pursuant to this, Wallace famously stood in the entrance of the University of Alabama in a vain attempt to block a federal desegregation order.
Apropos of which, it speaks volumes that the target of McConnell’s rebuke was a woman who was standing up for black civil rights. For the target of Wallace’s was also a woman, Vivian Malone Jones, who was doing the same; in that case, attempting to become the first black student to register for classes at the University of Alabama.
But if you’re surprised by this fateful racial symmetry, you don’t know Mitch. After all, I had just cause to analogize him to Wallace just last year. Recall that he famously stood in the way of Obama’s Supreme Court nominee even getting a hearing in a vain attempt to block this first black president from appointing a legacy-affirming third justice.
Here is how I held him in contempt in “Obama Presents Consensus Supreme Court Nominee, Merrick Garland,” March 16, 2016:
This, of course, is the same Mitch McConnell who, within days of Obama being sworn-in, pledged that Republicans would do all they could to make him a ‘failed, one-term president.’
Which is why this senator was to America’s first black president what Governor George Wallace was to the first blacks to integrate its schools. And the annals of history should record him as such. I just hope McConnell has the good sense to repent his racial sins before he meets his maker — the way Wallace famously did.
Meanwhile, nothing damns McConnell in this instance quite like four white male senators rising mere hours after Warren to read that same letter with nary a word of censure, let alone a formal rebuke.
All the same, it bears repeating that there is no denying this … blacklash:
I’m on record stating my suspicion that many whites voted for Obama in 2008 more as a gesture of racial absolution than of political faith. … Having thusly absolved themselves of their sins of racism (with this one, historic act), many of them now feel liberated to give way to their racial prejudices without fear of being called racists.
(“Romney vs. Obama: Race (Still) Matters,” The iPINIONS Journal, November 1, 2012)
This explains why so many who voted for Obama felt no compunction about voting for Trump — and we are witnessing the racist consequences of their blacklash every day.
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