Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) posted a series of tweets Monday to mark six months having passed since her speech on the Senate floor in opposition of then-Sen. Jeff Sessions’s nomination to be attorney general.
“Six months ago today – right about now, in fact – I went to the Senate floor to speak about Jeff Sessions,” Warren said. “Nobody wanted to talk about the fact that President Trump had nominated an AG too racist to become a federal judge in the 1980s.”
Warren then shared photos of supporters wearing shirts reading “nevertheless, she persisted,” a reference to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) speech after Warren was removed from the Senate floor.
Warren was barred from the Senate floor in February after she gave a blistering speech against Sessions, which Senate Republicans ruled was against Senate rules.
{mosads}Warren blasted Sessions’s nomination, saying 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.”
She also read from a letter written by the late Coretta Scott King, wife of Martin Luther King Jr., about Sessions in 1986.
King wrote during Sessions’s 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.
In a speech after the vote to bar Warren from speaking, McConnell defended the decision, noting Warren had been warned that she was potentially in violation of Senate rules.
“Sen. Warren was giving a lengthy speech. She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. She was given an explanation,” he said. “Nevertheless, she persisted.”
Warren blasted the decision after being removed from the floor, accusing McConnell of “silencing Mrs. King’s voice on the Senate floor – and millions who are afraid and appalled by what’s happening in our country.”