North Carolina's two Republican senators, Thom Tillis and Richard Burr, both oppose the nomination of U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch to be Attorney General. What's odd about that is Ms. Lynch grew up in Greensboro and Durham. You would think they'd be proud to have someone from their state, Harvard educated at that, be the next Attorney General.
Contrast this with the recent nomination of former Atlanta U.S. Attorney Sally Quillian Yates to be Deputy Attorney General. She is currently the Acting Deputy Attorney General and should be confirmed after Ms. Lynch gets voted on. The Deputy Attorney General runs the day-to-day operations of the Department of Justice and is that agency's number two official. As noted here, both of Georgia's Republican senators, Johnny Isakson and David Perdue, support Yates's nomination as did former senator, Saxby Chambliss.
A recent delegation from North Carolina in support of Ms. Lynch went to speak with Sens. Tillis and Burr to no avail. In fact, their meeting was not only unproductive, the participants from North Carolina characterized the meetings as "bogus and shameful."
Here's some of what they said, from McClatchy DC:
About 40 women from North Carolina conferred with their state’s two U.S. senators in Washington on Tuesday to urge them to support attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch, but left the meeting rejected and angry.
And this...
“Their responses were in a lot of ways very juvenile responses, the Rev. Michelle Laws, executive director of the North Carolina NAACP, who took part in the meeting, said afterward. “They decided not on her merit, not on her record, but on a response to a question..."
Summarized, that question centered on what Ms. Lynch would do differently from Eric Holder. Michelle Laws called that reasoning "shameful." Which it is.
And...
The Rev. William Barber, president of the NC NAACP, who also attended the meeting, called the senators’ reasons “weak, bogus, deeply partisan.” He noted that they brought up a Department of Justice inspector general’s report that raised some criticisms of the agency.
“There’s no agency that’s perfect,” he said. “But to ask Loretta Lynch, based on two or three things in a report how would she change things, when she hasn’t even had a chance to be in office, to examine, it’s just wrong.”
Both Ms. Lynch and Ms. Yates are fully qualified for these positions. Fortunately, North Carolina residents can vote out Senator Burr in two years. His actions, along with Tillis's, are partisan and unsupported by their reasoning. Par for the course for most Republicans. I can't wait for the 2016 elections.