Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions was confirmed as attorney general on Wednesday, but Sen. Elizabeth Warren, for one, didn’t make it easy for him. On Tuesday night, Warren attempted to read a damning letter about the nominee written three decades ago by the late Coretta Scott King. But Warren was interrupted by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who used an obscure rule that prohibits senators from impugning their colleagues to formally silence Warren. McConnell even unintentionally coined a feminist slogan by saying, “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”
Warren wasn’t done persisting, though. She finished reading King’s letter on Facebook Live and followed up again on Wednesday, just ahead of the vote to confirm Sesssions, by making a surprise appearance on The Daily Show to discuss the controversy with host Trevor Noah.
Noah started the segment by mocking McConnell’s spinelessness in opposing the president (“You said I couldn’t stand up to Donald Trump, and I couldn’t. But I’ll stand up to Dr. King’s dead widow”) and went on to question why four of Warren’s male colleagues—Tom Udall, Jeff Merkley, Sherrod Brown, and Bernie Sanders—were permitted to read from the same letter without facing the same censorship. But Warren herself remained resolutely positive about the outcome: “Millions of people are now reading Coretta Scott King’s letter,” she told Noah, calling the aftermath a recipe for “a better democratic conversation.”
The letter in question was written by King in 1986 to oppose Sessions’ nomination to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama at the time. “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,” wrote King, accusing Sessions of obstructing the rights of black voters and of “punishing” civil rights activists by using selective prosecution.
On being forbidden to read the letter on the Senate floor, Warren had this to say:
You notice the Republicans are not saying, “Hey, those aren’t the facts,” or “something has changed,” or “he did all these other things afterward.” No, what they’re saying is, “You don’t get to talk about that.”
The Senate voted 52 to 47 on Wednesday to confirm Sessions as attorney general.
