The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In shutting down Warren, GOP amplifies her
She has a rallying cry in rebuke over Sessions speech.
WASHINGTON — Republicans seized her microphone and gave her a megaphone.
Silenced on the Senate floor for condemning a peer, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., emerged Wednesday in an elevated role: the avatar of liberal resistance in the age of Trump.
Late Tuesday, Senate Republicans voted to halt the remarks of Warren, already a lodestar of the left, after she criticized a colleague, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., the nominee for attorney general, by reading a letter from Coretta Scott King.
The decision — led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who invoked a rarely enforced rule prohibiting senators from impugning the motives and conduct of a peer — amplified Warren’s message and further inflamed the angry Senate debate over Sessions’ nomination, who was confirmed later Wednesday.
In the meantime, some of Warren’s peers from the Democratic caucus, including Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico, read King’s letter on the Senate floor without facing any objection, prompting some activists to raise charges of sexism.
Warren’s moment rekindled the gender-infused politics that animated the presidential election and the women’s march protesting Trump the day after his inauguration last month. For her supporters it was the latest and most visceral example of a woman being silenced by men who do not want to listen to her.
The subsequent explanation from McConnell about why he muzzled Warren — “She was warned, she was given an explanation, nevertheless, she persisted” — seemed made for a future Warren campaign ad. After an unsuccessful effort to draft her for the 2016 presidential race, she is considered a very early front-runner for the 2020 nomination, should she choose to run.
McConnell’s coda has already been repurposed as a sort of rallying cry. Across social media, Warren’s allies and supporters posted “#ShePersisted,” calling to mind some Democrats’ embrace of the term “nasty woman” after Trump deployed it to describe Hillary Clinton during a debate. Appearing with Clinton in New Hampshire in October, Warren reminded Trump that “nasty women vote.”
Warren has long displayed an instinct for capitalizing on highly visible fights. After she was barred from speaking on the Senate floor late Tuesday, she began reading the 1986 letter from King on Facebook Live. By Wednesday afternoon, the video had attracted more than 7 million views. In the letter, King, the widow of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., took aim at Sessions’ record on civil rights as a federal prosecutor in Alabama, saying he had used “the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens.”
On Wednesday morning in a conference room in the Capitol — the rule only prohibits Warren from speaking about the nomination from the Senate floor — Warren addressed civil rights leaders, recounting her long night.
“What hit me the hardest was, it is about silence,” she said. “It’s about trying to shut people up. It’s about saying, ‘No, no, no, just go ahead and vote.’
“This is going to be hard,” she said. “We don’t have the tools. There’s going to be a lot that we will lose. But I guarantee, the one thing we will not lose, we will not lose our voices.”
On Wednesday, Republicans showed no regret for their move, accusing Warren of thinking of a 2020 presidential run and ignoring repeated warnings to avoid violating the Senate rule, known as Rule XIX. She had also read a letter from the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, who also represented Massachusetts, disparaging Sessions.
“You don’t insult — whether it be from a letter, or from a message from God, or on golden tablets,” said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. “That’s the rules of the Senate. They want to complain about it, complain about it.”
Democrats resumed their protest against Sessions with renewed swagger, despite their long odds of preventing his confirmation.
“If Mr. McConnell or anybody else wants to deny me the right to debate Jeff Sessions’ qualifications, go for it,” Sanders said from the Senate floor Wednesday.