Wanna know what happened this evening in the confirmation hearings for Senator Jeff Sessions to be Trump’s Attorney General (note I don’t say our Attorney General)?:

Senate Republicans passed a party-line rebuke Tuesday night of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for a speech opposing attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions, striking down her words for impugning the Alabama senator’s character.

In an extraordinarily rare move, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) interrupted Warren’s speech, in a near-empty chamber as debate on Sessions’s nomination heads toward a Wednesday evening vote, and said that she had breached Senate rules by reading past statements against Sessions from figures such as the late senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and the late Coretta Scott King.

The statements contained in Mrs. King’s letter and Senator Kennedy’s speech speak directly to the reason that Senator Sessions is unfit to hold this position. Silencing Warren means that the GOP is now a political organization dedicated to achieving power for themselves and their wealthy supporters and that in that ugly pursuit they do not scruple to openly support an authoritarian racist while ruthlessly suppressing any dissent. This is not the way a democracy works.

Let Blunt know that his party has overstepped the line and that if he voted to suppress these statements, his party will face a reckoning in 2018 – and that we will not forget the role he has played in facilitating the despicable Trump. Also ask him why Republicans are so afraid to have a truly open debate. Here a link to his email contact form; there are also links to his office with phone numbers.

Addendum: Here’s a link to Mrs. Kings letter, also checkout #LetLlizSPeak on Twitter.

Addendum 2: Interesting take on this incident and why it’s important:

But the other side of the coin is the prospect of a creeping normalization of what is happening to both the executive and legislative branches of our government – and potentially to the judicial if this administration survives. We’ve seen how the norms of what have kept these institutions functioning for decades are being slowly eroded in a way that too often goes unchallenged.

A perfect example was the silencing of Sen. Elizabeth Warren last night on the Senate floor when she attempted to read Coretta Scott King’s letter in opposition to the nomination of Sessions to be the Attorney General. While those of us who follow these kinds of things closely were appalled, most Americans will either never know it happened or will simply assume that it is business as usual in a divided Senate. That is how this kind of thing gets normalized.

Addendum 3: Here’s what Elizbeth Warren has to say to say about how the unsavory incident could help mobilize the resistance that will be necessary to keep such events from becoming business as ususal:

“People all over this country need to see how Donald Trump is trying to transform America into a meaner, more hateful place,” Warren said. “Democracy is not a machine that runs itself. It requires people.”

Photos by Jerry Schmidt.

Previously:

The post that made Blue Girl burst with pride and pass the baton (October 15, 2016)

Would you like to see the Elizabeth Warren speech for Jason Kander? (October 16, 2016)

Over the weekend Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill got some attention for a comment she made in a New York Times article which implied that when it came to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade treaty, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) was some kind of outsize ego who was vocally fighting the treaty only for the attention:

“She has sought the spotlight the most,” said Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri. “I’m as confused as you are,” she added, when asked why Ms. Warren had emerged as a central player on the trade issue. For example, she said: “No one has worked harder on these issues over the years than Sherrod Brown. But I remember what my father told me when I got into politics: ‘Remember what you’re doing is not always fair.’ “

McCaskill probably made more news when she made a backhanded attempt to distance herself from the remarks, tweeting:

We all seek attention (including me!) in Washington. Elizabeth Warren deserves it. She is strong, smart, and focused,

8:07 AM – 16 May 2015

You’ve probably noticed that this much-publicized “backtracking” carefully avoided an actual apology, but instead subtly doubled down on the original insult with an airy “we all do it.” It’s not surprising that the Times chose McCaskill’s comment to underline its article which seems to have been designed to undercut Warren’s opposition to the TPP. The subtext of the article was that Warren was resorting to what the Times reporter, Jennifer Steinhauer, represented as  Warren’s reliance on opportunistic media-mongering in an effort to horn in and steal the glory from more legitimate foes of the treaty:

Yet away from the Capitol, it is all Elizabeth Warren. Her public relations strategy has been textbook Warren: near exclusive use of liberal news media outlets like Rachel Maddow of MSNBC as receptive sounding boards for her ideas, appearances at academic forums and liberal think tanks, and a narrow focus on her favorite targets – in this case, her concerns that the bill would fray signature financial regulations.

Echoes of President Obama, perhaps, who doesn’t want us to forget that Senator Warren is, after all, a “politician like everybody else.” Add in the Times article and Senator McCaskill’s ironic effort to get in on the show, and it all begins to sound like a put-up job, an effort by proponents of the TPP to undermine one of the most effective spokesmen against it – not to mention one of the best advocates of the progressive vision that so scares cautious politicians like Claire McCaskill. The article also implies that the meticulous Warren is more noise than substance and compares her to the worst of Republican ideologues.

Steinhauer, in a nodd to “fair” journalism, does admit, sotto voce, that Warren does actually have a dog in the fight, given her fears that the TPP could work against hard-won advances in financial regulation. Steinhauer, however, attempts to cast this concern as somehow self-interested, a “narrow focus on her favorite targets,” an implication that is demonstrably incorrect. Just today, for example, Warren’s staff released a report that exhaustively documents the consistent failure to enforce provisions in past treaties designed to protect workers and environment.

We know, politics is a nasty game – or so we are assured by folks who are busy cleaning the slime off their hands – and McCaskill is one of the fourteen Senators who are supporting the TPP. That explains why she might be willing to undermine Warren. But how to explain the mean girl tone? Why is she so willing to cooperate with folks who rather clearly hope to undermine Warren as a progressive spokesman, “a thorn” in the president’s side?

Is McCaskill just helping with the President’s dirty work? Or could it have something to do with the fact that probably nobody in the Democratic party would ever try to draft McCaskill to run for President – an honor accorded to Warren in her first term? McCaskill has charted a careful course, taken few risks. Do you think she expects to be rewarded for surviving Missouri’s admittedly hellacious political climate by turning her back on some of the most important progressive issues? Do you think maybe she resents just a little the adulation that the brilliant, charismatic Warren has garnered in so short a time? If so, I’ve got some news for McCaskill: leaders take risks, lesser people take pot-shots.  

Steve Benen at Maddow Blog writes today about the efforts of President Obama and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren to do something about the issue of college affordability for middle and working class families, specifically about college loan debt. It’s a big problem for a country that desperately needs to educate its children:

The numbers are staggering. As Ayan Chatterjee recently reported, “Student marketing company Edvisors calculates that the average student in the class of 2014 is expected to graduate with nearly $33,000 in debt, with nearly 60 percent of all college students having taken out a student loan. And because the debt burden has risen significantly faster than inflation, up a whopping 361.3% since 2003 according to the New York Federal Reserve, the total pile of student debt in the United States now sits at almost $1.2 trillion dollars.”

The President is proposing mechanisms to make it easier to pay back loans while, Warren is sponsoring a new, lower-interest loan structure – one which would allow students with existing loans to refinance them at a lower rate, making college something other than a life sentence of debt servitude.

Republican legislators, who are mostly responsible for the student loan interest rates currently in place – which only benefits private lenders to the detriment of college students – are, as might be expected, mostly opposed to Warren’s legislation. Thirty-nine Democrats have, however, jumped in to co-sponsor the bill.

Which leads to my question. Why is Claire McCaskill’s name missing from the list of these co-sponsors? She was present and accounted for last time Warren tried to do something about student debt. Is she just late in signing up or does she think it’s enough to vote “yea” when the times come. Or does she have a problem with this year’s version? Why don’t you ask McCaskill why she’s AWOL on this bill? I’m planning to do so.