On Tuesday’s broadcast of “CNN Tonight,” Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) reacted to being charged with a rule violation and barred from further debate after she attempted to read a letter by Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow, Coretta Scott King, on the Senate floor about Attorney General nominee Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) by saying that the letter factually details how Sessions “worked to keep blacks from having access to the ballot box.”
Warren said, “I read the letter, because Coretta Scott King, in her letter, had discussed what Jeff Sessions had done while he was the United States Attorney for Alabama. And she walks through his prosecution of civil rights workers, what it was that Jeff Sessions did, to the black vote, and to try to chill the black vote, to try to keep African-Americans away from the polls.”
She added that she believes Republicans are interpreting the rules of the Senate however they want to, and “we can’t talk on the floor of the Senate about what Jeff Sessions did back in the 1980s, how he worked to keep blacks from having access to the ballot box. We can’t talk about that, as we debate his nomination to be the attorney general of the United States. That’s fundamentally wrong.”
Warren further stated that the claims made by King in the letter are facts that King witnessed.
She also argued, “[T]his is a time when we can’t debate the nominees. The Republicans are determined to just cram them down our throat sideways. You tell me a time in American history, after we had a Department of Education, when it was that someone who basically doesn’t believe in public education would become the secretary of education, and could get so little support in the Senate that literally, just the divide, that there were Democrats, Republicans, Independents voting against her, and they would haul the vice president of the United States over here to do a tie breaker, so that she can go run the Department of Education. This is a shocking moment.” And that Republicans were saying that you couldn’t talk about the bad things Sessions did.
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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