Mitch McConnell Silences Elizabeth Warren After Speech Against Jeff Sessions

On Tuesday, during a Senate debate, Mitch McConnell led a party-line vote to silence Senator Elizabeth Warren from continuing her speech.
McConnell said that Senator Warren had broken Senate rules – specifically pointing to Warren quoting a letter from the late Coretta Scott King, civil rights activist and wife of Martin Luther King Jr. as evidence that she had broken the rules. Senators voted 49-43, rejecting Warren’s push to overturn a ruling by Senate Republicans that she had violated the rules during a Senate floor speech.
(Editor’s note: But really, it was because a bunch of insecure white men couldn’t handle a woman quoting the wise words of another woman.)

Coretta Scott King wrote in 1986, during Sessions’ failed confirmation hearing for a federal judgeship, that he “had used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens” as a U.S. attorney in Alabama.

Warren’s blistering speech against Sessions also argued he wouldn’t stand up to Trump’s “campaign of bigotry.”

“He made derogatory and racist comments that should have no place in our justice system,” she said. “To put Sen. Sessions in charge of the Department of Justice is an insult to African-Americans.”

Democrats respond

Democrats quickly responded by creating the Twitter hashtag #LetLizSpeak

“It is demeaning to the memory of Coretta Scott King and harmful to the process for the Republicans to silence,” Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) said on Twitter, adding “let Liz speak.”

Senator Warren also tweeted Tuesday night