The White House on Monday accused Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., of playing politics with the nomination of Loretta Lynch to be attorney general and called the Senate delay in approving her “unconscionable.”
“She is someone who has distinguished herself as a tough and independent lawyer,” Earnest said. “… There’s no single legitimate question that has been raised about her aptitude for this job. Instead what we’ve seen is a bunch of political obstructionism.”
Lynch, Earnest pointed out, successfully prosecuted terrorists who targeted the New York subway system, brought charges against public officials in both parties and jailed some of New York’s most violent mobsters and gang members.
McConnell on Sunday said Lynch’s confirmation would not go forward until Congress works out a partisan impasse over a human trafficking bill.
“It’s not a threat,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “We need to finish this human trafficking bill that came out of the Judiciary Committee unanimously … because the next week we’ll be doing the budget and the next two weeks after that congress is not in session.”
The human trafficking bill stalled after Democrats accused Republicans of slipping anti-abortion language into the bill. McConnell argued that Democrats on the Judiciary Committee all signed off the bill before forwarding it to the floor for full consideration.
At this point, McConnell said Lynch’s nomination would be pushed off until April after Congress’ spring recess.
Earnest, however, said Republicans wrongly injected the highly partisan issue of abortion into a bill that otherwise enjoys broad consensus on both sides of the aisle. He accused McConnell of a failure in leadership for his inability to get the human-trafficking bill across the finish line.
“The fact that Mitch McConnell can’t build bipartisan support for a human trafficking bill shows that his leadership is not off to a very good start,” Earnest said.
