Keep talking, Sen. Warren: Mrs. King’s words matter
Gail Collins
It’s a dark and dismal time for American liberals. Except for the part where the opposition keeps shooting itself in the foot.
We will now pause to contemplate the fact that this week the Senate Republicans attempted to forward their agenda by silencing Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts while she was reading a letter from Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow.
In explanation, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell basically called Warren a pushy girl.
Which do you think the Democrats found most empowering: Trump’s first full day in the White House, when he marched off to the CIA to deliver a rambling tirade about the inauguration crowd size? The Holocaust Remembrance Day proclamation that eliminated any reference to the Jews? Or the new Supreme Court nominee saying the president who named him was being “demoralizing” and “disheartening”?
Or this Senate-silencing moment? The subject at hand was the nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions for attorney general. The debate was going to be endless. It was evening and nobody was listening. Warren was taking her turn and reading a letter Coretta Scott King wrote about Sessions in 1986. That was when Sessions was rejected for a federal judgeship on the basis of an impressive record of racial insensitivity as a U.S. attorney in Alabama. The charges included referring to a black assistant U.S. attorney as “boy,” joking about the Ku Klux Klan and referring to the NAACP as “un-American.”
McConnell cited Rule 19, which is more than a century old. It comes up about once a generation, when somebody calls a colleague an idiot or a liar. But this was totally different. The other senators were startled — or would have been if most of them had not been napping or back in their offices, dialing up donors.
“She was warned,” McConnell said later. “She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”
Wow, nothing worse than a woman who won’t stop talking.
“They were waiting to Rule 19 someone, and they specifically targeted Elizabeth,” said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. “I think because she’s effective.”
Dark and extremely conspiratorial minds suggested the whole thing was a Republican plot to promote Warren as a presidential candidate, since they believe Trump could defeat her in 2020. This presumes that McConnell is suffering from a patho- logical case of advance planning.
More likely he’s simply exhausted from dealing with a White House occupant who’s managed, just this week, to accuse the media of not covering terrorism; to suggest that George W. Bush was more of a killer than Vladimir Putin; and to use the official presidential account to tweet an attack on Nordstrom’s for discontinuing his daughter’s fashion line.
And the Republicans in Congress can’t figure out how to work around him.
“They’re definitely squirming,” said Rep. Joe Crowley of New York, the chairman of the House Democratic caucus, in a phone interview. Crowley was on his way to Baltimore for a party strategy conference.
The Democrats are immersed in an ongoing battle between centrists and progressives and a long way from coming up with a united message. “There’s still anger and a bit of depression, but ... they’re giving us incredible fodder.” Charles Krauthammer
Stupid but legal. Such is the Trump administration’s travel ban for people from seven Muslim countries. Of course, as with almost everything in American life, what should be a policy or even a moral issue becomes a legal one. The judicial challenge should have been given short shrift, since the presidential grant of authority to exclude the entry of immigrants is extremely wide and statutorily clear. The judge who issued the temporary restraining order never even made a case for its illegality.
The Ninth Circuit has indeed ruled against the immigration ban, but even if the ban is ulti-