Washington
The day after an unusually tense conflict on the Senate floor, the chamber voted, 52 to 47, on Wednesday evening to clear Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., whose record on civil and voting rights as a federal prosecutor and state attorney general has long been criticized. Sessions won confirmation almost exclusively along party lines. Sen. Joe Manchin III, of W.Va., was the only Democrat who supported him, and no Republican voted against him. Sessions voted present.
All four Twin State senators opposed his nomination.
In remarks after his confirmation, Sessions mentioned the “heated debate” surrounding him and said he hoped “the intensity of the last few weeks” would give way to better relations in the Senate.
Trump’s victory came after a bruising confirmation process for Sessions and other Cabinet nominees, which Democrats have used to amplify their concerns about the president’s agenda even as they have fallen short of derailing any nominees.
These proxy battles have generated friction in the traditionally cordial upper chamber, as revealed Tuesday evening when Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., rebuked Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., accusing her of breaking a Senate rule against impugning a fellow senator’s character and blocking her from speaking for the remainder of the Sessions debate.
In doing so, McConnell asserted his control over a legislative body that is increasingly at risk of veering from normal protocol. But he also sparked a backlash, with accusations of sexism and selective use of an obscure Senate rule bouncing around social media for much of Wednesday.
Ahead of the final vote, Democratic senators arrived one after another in the chamber on Wednesday to criticize McConnell, particularly for this statement late Tuesday: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” Outside the Senate, liberals gleefully thanked McConnell for elevating Warren, one of the Democratic Party’s biggest stars, and handing her a slogan for a potential 2020 presidential bid.
“I think Leader McConnell owes Sen. Warren an apology,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said in a floor speech on Wednesday. He and Democrats were particularly chagrined that a Senate rule could be invoked to block criticism of someone who is up for confirmation before the body.
Warren unleashed a tweetstorm of displeasure following Sessions’s confirmation on Wednesday night, saying the new attorney general — and the GOP senators who supported him — will hear from her and “all of us” if Sessions makes “the tiniest attempt” to bring “his racism, sexism & bigotry” to the Justice Department. She said all senators who voted to put Sessions’s “radical hatred” into power would hear from the opposition. “Consider this MY warning: We won’t be silent,” Warren tweeted. “We will persist.”
While Democrats couldn’t block Sessions’s confirmation, there may have been other upsides to the fireworks: rallying their liberal base by demonstrating a willingness to fight Republicans and publicly scrutinize Trump’s team.
“We didn’t go into this hoping just to tell a story. We wanted to beat one or two of these nominees,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn. “And it doesn’t look like we’re going to do that. But there’s value in telling the story.”
Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said that the intense focus Democrats put on Sessions will make the public “much more likely to watch to see if he’s independent of the president or just a shill for the president.”
The flare-up over Warren’s remarks began as she attempted to read a statement by Coretta Scott King, the widow of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., in opposition to Sessions’s 1986 nomination for a slot as a federal district court judge. The letter accused Sessions of using his role at the time as a U.S. attorney to undermine voting rights.
“Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office in a shabby attempt to intimidate and frighten elderly black voters,” wrote King, who died in 2006.
Several Democrats took to the Senate floor on Wednesday to reread a portion of that statement in solidarity with Warren.
“Still banned from floor, but spoke w/ civil rights leaders this AM to say: Coretta Scott King will not be silenced,” Warren told more than 1.8 million Twitter followers on Wednesday morning.
Republicans were not happy with Warren’s actions. In an interview on Fox News, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, accused his Democratic colleague of advancing false claims about Sessions and sought to remind Americans that Southern Democrats were “the party of the Ku Klux Klan” and spearheaded segregation laws decades ago.
“The Democrats are angry and they’re out of their minds. … They’re just foaming at the mouth, practically,” Cruz said.
Cruz once called McConnell a liar on the Senate floor, and he was not rebuked.
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., argued that Republicans were hypocrites. They had no qualms about silencing Warren, he argued, even as they have declined to rebuke Trump for aggressively lobbing insults at his critics.
“My Republican colleagues can hardly summon a note of disapproval for an administration that insults a federal judge, tells the news media to shut up, offhandedly threatens a legislator’s career and seems to invent new dimensions of falsehood each and every day,” Schumer said. “I hope that this anti-free-speech attitude is not traveling down Pennsylvania Avenue to our great chamber.”
Sen. Tim Scott, of S.C., the Senate’s only African-American Republican, offered a deeply personal defense of Sessions, who he said had “earned my support.” Scott read social-media messages he had received arguing that he had let black people down with his support for Sessions. “I left out all the ones that used the ‘n-word,’ ” Scott said in a floor speech to which at least nine of his Republican colleagues came to watch.
Scott said he didn’t take issue with Warren’s attempt to read King’s words, but rather with her reading of a statement by Edward Kennedy, the liberal senator from Massachusetts who died in 2009. “The Senate needs to function. We need to have comity in this body,” Scott said.