Thursday, February 9, 2017

The Silencing and Rebuking of Elizabeth Warren Is an Attempt to Normalize the Intolerable

The Silencing and Rebuking of Elizabeth Warren Is an Attempt to Normalize the Intolerable:

"Warren was silenced and rebuked for speaking truth to power through the words of a great civil rights leader. In effect, McConnell and the Republicans in the Senate were also sanctioning Coretta Scott King. You can't argue with the facts. As a politician in Alabama, Sessions was well known for being an outspoken opponent of Black civil and voting rights. That does not bode well for people of color if he becomes attorney general of the United States. The attorney general oversees enforcement of civil and voting rights throughout the United States. Therefore, Warren's reading of the King letter was pertinent and timely to the debate about his confirmation in the Senate. King's letter conveyed the words, in essence, of an expert witness. The notion that the Senate should be able to prevent a senator from speaking the facts in order to try to ensure that another senator's reputation remains untarnished by the truth is unacceptable. King and Warren weren't impugning Sessions' character; they were exposing it. As a result of oral and written testimony, such as King's, Sessions was not confirmed in 1986 to the federal bench by the Senate. By both censoring and censuring Elizabeth Warren, the Republicans in the Senate are attempting to normalize the intolerable record of Sessions' racist past.  That is as deceitful as it is reprehensible."