A daily roundup of the biggest stories in right-wing media.
On Tuesday evening, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell interrupted Sen. Elizabeth Warren as she was reading a letter that Coretta Scott King had submitted to the Senate in 1986, when King was hoping to block the judicial appointment of Sen. Jeff Sessions. McConnell stopped Warren from reading the letter by invoking Section 2 of Rule 19, which states “No Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.” Conservative media outlets seized on this incident and its fallout, focusing on Warren’s supposed violation of Senate norms.
“Warren may have thought she could skirt the rules if she quoted someone else speaking about Sessions, but instead she was forced to end her remarks because of her breach of Senate protocol,” an article on Breitbart read. Though the site suggested McConnell was in the right—chiding Warren, “a Harvard Law School professor and attorney,” for pleading “bewilderment”—it also published a post delving into Warren’s defense of her remarks, repeating without commentary her assertion that the letter she had been reading “factually details how Sessions ‘worked to keep blacks from having access to the ballot box.’ ”
Other outlets suggested that Warren had behaved childishly. “Elizabeth Warren Throws a Fit After Being Shut Down by Mitch McConnell,” read a headline on the Daily Caller’s home page. Another Daily Caller teaser promises to reveal, “The MITCH SLAP on the Senate Floor That Everyone Is Talking About.”
“The U.S. Senate sent a clear, direct message to one of its most liberal members last night: Follow the rules or sit down,” LifeZette wrote in a post teased on the home page as “McConnell Takes Action to Stop Destructive Democrat Antics.” The post went on to say that McConnell “unleashed” Rule 19 to “restore comity to the troubled legislative body” and that “Hollywood liberals” upset at McConnell “went ballistic, suggesting democracy was at stake.”
The Daily Caller found other reasons to attack Warren throughout the day. Questioning her chances as a presidential candidate, for example, it cited her declining favorables from a January Massachusetts poll, writing that her popularity “has plunged.” Those same figures come up in one of two additional articles on the site calling out MSNBC for its enthusiastic response to Warren Tuesday night.
In a piece of “Exclusive” reporting drawn from publicly accessible data, the Daily Caller also highlighted what it characterized as excessive salaries at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an organization that the article says “was founded by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and then-President Barack Obama in 2011.” (The CFPB’s legal basis derives from the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which predates Warren’s term in the Senate.) “Pay is flowing so generously at the [CFPB] that hundreds of bureaucrats there receive more than most members of Congress,” the article reads.
The story of McConnell interrupting Warren was also shared widely on conservative Facebook pages:
