Justice delayed, Lynch confirmed

The Senate Thursday finally got around to confirming Loretta Lynch as U.S. attorney general. The vote ended a protracted confirmation process that had pushed partisan tensions on Capitol Hill to new heights.

The final vote was 56 to 43, giving Ms. Lynch six more votes than she needed and five more than she had effectively been assured of for weeks.

Republicans had long struggled to justify their decision to delay Ms. Lynch’s confirmation. Their opposition was never about her but instead about President Barack Obama and his executive orders on immigration. Ironically, that opposition meant that Ms. Lynch, who played no role in those orders, remained sidelined for months while Eric Holder, who approved the legal justification for them, remained on the job.

Her nomination was further delayed when Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, for unexplained reasons, made passage of an unrelated human-trafficking bill a prerequisite for her confirmation vote. That legislation was derailed by a largely unrelated fight about abortion funding, which was settled this week with some creative accounting. The deal cleared the way for Ms. Lynch’s nomination to finally come to the Senate floor.

In the end, 10 Republicans joined the entire Democratic caucus to push her nomination over the finish line, making her the first black woman to lead the Justice Department. Those Republicans who voted for her confirmation included the five senators who had already signaled their support — Orrin Hatch, Jeff Flake, Lindsey Graham, Susan Collins and Mark Kirk — as well as a group of five others that, most surprisingly of all, included Mitch McConnell himself.

Josh Voorhees is a senior writer for Slate.