So yesterday, this happened:
Republican senators voted on Tuesday to formally silence a Democratic colleague for impugning a peer, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, by condemning his nomination for attorney general while reading a letter from Coretta Scott King.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, had been holding forth on the Senate floor on the eve of Mr. Sessions’s expected confirmation vote, reciting a 1986 letter from Mrs. King that criticized Mr. Sessions’s record on civil rights.
Sensing a stirring beside her a short while later, Ms. Warren stopped herself and scanned the chamber.
Across the room, Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, had stepped forward with an objection, setting off an extraordinary confrontation in the Capitol and silencing a colleague, procedurally, in the throes of a contentious debate over President Trump’s cabinet nominee.
“The senator has impugned the motives and conduct of our colleague from Alabama, as warned by the chair,” Mr. McConnell began, alluding to Mrs. King’s letter, which accused Mr. Sessions of using “the awesome powers of his office in a shabby attempt to intimidate and frighten elderly black voters.”
Mr. McConnell called the Senate to order under what is known as Rule XIX, which prohibits debating senators from ascribing “to another senator or to other senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a senator.”
A dick move for sure. But that didn’t stop one of Warren’s best colleagues from picking up where she left off:
The Coretta Scott King letter opposing Jeff Sessions‘ 1986 nomination as a federal judge was finally read in its entirety in the U.S. Senate, but not by Senator Elizabeth Warren. Instead, it was Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown who got to read it without any opposition.
“It’s a sad day for our democracy when the words of Coretta Scott King are not allowed on the floor of the U.S. Senate,” Brown said before he started reading the letter.
He was referencing the turn of events on the Senate floor on February 7, when Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to let Brown’s fellow Democrat read the letter.
Brown also spoke against Sessions’ nomination on Tuesday night for about 20 minutes.
While Brown is fighting to prevent a racist from being appointed as Attorney General, here’s what Brown’s likely GOP opponent has been up to:
The Republican who hopes to unseat Democratic U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown in 2018 said radical Islamic terrorists could try to infiltrate Ohio in a whole new way. State Treasurer Josh Mandel made the provocative, and unproven claim, that so-called sanctuary cities could be aiding terrorists.
Several Ohio cities, including Lorain and Oberlin, have a don’t ask, don’t tell policy involving people’s immigration statuses, often to erase fears of deportation if they tried to report an emergency to authorities.
Mandel is throwing his support behind possible legislation from Candice Keller (District 53-Middletown) that would prohibit sanctuary jurisdictions and fine and jail local elected officials for turning a blind eye to federal immigration laws if an undocumented immigrant in their jurisdiction commits a crime.
"Our top priority must be keeping Ohio families safe from radical Islamic terrorists and other threats,” Mandel said in a statement.
But according to Pew Research, of the 11 million or so immigrants in the U.S. illegally in 2014, just about 140,000, or a little over one percent, were from The Middle East. Most immigrants in the country illegally were from Mexico and Central America and are not Muslim.
Click here to contact your Senator to oppose Sessions’ nomination.
And click here to help keep Brown in the Senate.