If this was 1920, and Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge had disciplined his fellow Bay Stater for impugning the integrity of a colleague, we might have fairly said Elizabeth Warren was silenced on Tuesday night. Lacking an instantaneously publishing Internet and ’round-the-clock cable news, she would have been deprived of media through which to continue channeling her message. Absent a coalition of interest groups to conduct rapid response on her behalf, her crusade may have fizzled.
Without the megaphone of modern communication—surely it’s large enough now to be called a gigaphone—what developed in the Senate when the majority leader invoked a rule of decorum to quiet his colleague could have amounted to a meaningful denial of Warren’s protest of attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions.
Instead, it was a symbolic denial, and it was to her benefit. As CNN’s Eric Bradner observed, the GOP majority’s decision to remove Warren from the debate turned “what could have been an ordinary late-night partisan floor speech for political devotees into a national story.” Her remarks could have just been printed in the Congressional Record. Her inability to complete them landed her on the home page of major American news sites, and an interview with Don Lemon.
“I just want to be clear here: By telling the truth, by reading a document that was written back in 1986 by Coretta Scott King, I was impugning Mr. Sessions, and I was the one ruled out of order, and I’m not permitted to speak on the floor of the Senate again until after the vote for Mr. Sessions,” Warren told the interviewer in her own defense.
She had previously been warned for quoting the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, who called Sessions “a disgrace to the Justice Department” during a 1986 confirmation hearing to make the then-U.S. attorney a federal district judge. The comment that provoked McConnell was Warren’s quoting of King: “Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his [attorney’s] office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as a federal judge.”
Said Lemon, “The interesting thing is now [that Sessions] is being considered for attorney general, how are you supposed to criticize him in any way?”
Well, for one, appearing on CNN, which has a substantially bigger viewership than C-SPAN.
