Last night’s decision by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to invoke Senate Rule XIX and silence Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has certainly helped her personal brand. It is against Senate rules to impugn the integrity and motives of a fellow senator, even if he is a nominee under debate, and even if the accusations are true.
Warren was warned about this when she quoted the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., calling Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., “a disgrace” during debate on his nomination to be attorney general. McConnell finally invoked the rule when she quoted from a letter by Coretta Scott King alleging that Sessions “used the awesome powers of his office in a shabby attempt to intimidate and frighten elderly black voters.”
This and other accusations in the letter Warren read, from Coretta Scott King (MLK’s widow) appear to be defamatory, in my opinion, and certainly not backed up by any evidence in the letter itself. They stem from the fact that when Sessions served as a U.S. Attorney under President Reagan, he unsuccessfully prosecuted three of King’s friends (fellow civil rights activists from back in the day) for systematically tampering with absentee ballots. The investigation began when several absentee voters actually complained that their votes had been changed, a fairly serious crime and not the first instance of this to be reported in Alabama in the 1980s. The case went down in flames, in part because the two lawyers Sessions was able to spare for the prosecution found themselves outgunned in court by an experienced defense team. Also, some of the complaining voters changed their story on the stand.
But setting the merits aside (after all, truth is not a defense under Rule XIX), the decision to reprimand Warren obviously backfired. Over at HotAir, AllahPundit wonders whether McConnell actually intended to elevate Warren in this way, especially given that Democratic senators subsequently entered the same letter into the record anyway:
It’s tempting to believe that McConnell pulled this because he wanted free press for Warren, knowing that she has her eye on 2020. In other words, he’s trying to help pick Trump’s next opponent early by crowning Warren as a leader of “the Resistance.”
He acknowledges that this strategy is often “too clever by half,” and offers the alternative explanation that perhaps McConnell believed Republicans would “get a kick out of seeing a prominent Democrat punished for her obstruction tactics.”
Personally, I don’t even think it’s that complicated. Democrats have decided, for one reason or another, to throw as much sand into the Senate’s gears as they can fit in their fists. They have repeatedly blocked committees from meeting by objecting on the floor, and even forced floor votes on whether to go into and out of executive session nine times this month (which is basically unheard of) for the sole purpose of making everyone’s life miserable for as long as nominations are being considered.
I think McConnell just basically decided that two can play that game. If the Democrats want to be sticklers for the rules, then he will respond in kind when given the opportunity.
It didn’t play out as intended, and he surely recognizes it by now — as evidenced by the fact that at least three different Democratic Senators read the same letter into the record this morning without any objection. As Ben Shapiro wisely pointed out, “You can’t elect Donald Trump president of the United States and then stand on ceremony when it comes to civility.” He’s right, of course, although I’d still argue that the rule exists for a reason. There’s a decent argument that senators deserve a level of artificial decorum and civility on the Senate floor — not for their own sakes, but for the sake of the sovereign states they represent.
In any event, the whole episode merely drew additional attention to accusations Sessions had already addressed during his confirmation hearings, and will make him start off in his new job a bit more unpopular than he would have been otherwise.
