Warren: GOP ‘can’t change the truth’

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) says a GOP effort to silence critics of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) will not make him fit to serve as President Trump’s attorney general.

“There have been some harsh words on the United States Senate throughout the years,” she said late Tuesday on “CNN Tonight.”

“But all of a sudden, when I’m reading something, a truthful statement from Coretta Scott King, the answer, ‘Nope, can’t say that,’ ” Warren told host Don Lemon.

{mosads}“Let me tell you this: They can shut me up, but they can’t change the truth. What Coretta Scott King talked about Jeff Sessions doing back in 1986 is something every American should know about.”

The Senate voted to bar Warren from speaking on the floor late Tuesday after Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said she had broken chamber rules and “impugned” Sessions.

Warren quoted the late King, civil rights activist and wife of Martin Luther King Jr., during a blistering speech arguing against Sessions’s confirmation.

“[Sessions] had used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens,” Warren quoted, referencing Sessions’s work as a U.S. attorney in Alabama prior to his failed federal judgeship confirmation hearing in 1986.

Warren added during the CNN interview that Republicans are stifling criticism of all of Trump’s Cabinet nominees, citing Tuesday’s confirmation of Betsy DeVos as Education secretary as another example.

“Well, you know, this is a time when we can’t debate nominees,” she said. “The Republicans are determined to just cram them down our throat sideways.”

“You tell me a time in American history after we had a Department of Education, when it was that someone who basically doesn’t believe in public education would become the secretary of Education?” Warren asked.