CLEVELAND — Newspapers and websites across the land were dominated last week by headlines proclaiming that Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts had been “silenced” in her effort to derail the confirmation of fellow Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama as U.S. attorney general.
Read more: Should the Senate have told Sen. Elizabeth Warren to shut up? Editorial Board Roundtable
After 50 minutes of vitriolic, anti-Sessions diatribe on the Senate floor, she was indeed ordered to curtail her remarks for the rest of the confirmation debate, having twice ignored warnings from the chair that personal attacks against a fellow senator violated the chamber’s rules.
But silenced, she most assuredly was not. In fact, she might have been the most un-silent person in America last week.
She recorded a live Facebook video immediately afterward, launched a ubiquitous television campaign, including appearances on the Rachel Maddow show and the View in addition to a host of news reports, and she unleashed a storm of tweets that would put Donald Trump to shame.
The clock hadn’t struck midnight on the day of her “silencing,” before a fundraising letter went out from her campaign committee asking for money to “fight back against Donald Trump’s reckless agenda.”
And before the weekend, T-shirts were being printed with the words of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” Using that meme, Warren was soon being compared with civil rights icons Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks, for crying out loud – and, perhaps more appropriately, with Angela Davis.
If that’s being silenced, we can only imagine what she would be like at full volume.
If you haven’t done so, I invite you to watch the video of Warren’s attack on Sessions, and judge for yourself. Your judgment will likely depend on your politics, but perhaps we can all agree that she did manage to get her point across – which was, basically, that the only thing Sessions lacks is a white hood (since Warren likes to go back in time, perhaps she could borrow one for Sessions from the effects of her late Democratic colleague in the Senate, former Exalted Cyclops Robert Byrd).
Elizabeth Warren’s Floor Speech Against Jeff Sessions – FULL VIDEO
The highlight of her address was a pair of 30-year-old readings, stemming from Sessions’ confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1986 after he was nominated for a federal judgeship. One was excerpts from remarks by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy during the hearing, and the other was a letter from Coretta Scott King.
She did get to read them, despite all the caterwauling about how the words of Mrs. King were not welcome on the Senate floor, and some defiant grandstanding from Democrat Sens. Bernie Sanders, Sherrod Brown and others, who stood and repeated the King letter just to make sure nobody missed it.
Warren’s use of the Kennedy quote was particularly interesting.
“Mr. Sessions is a throwback to a shameful era which I know both black and white Americans thought was in our past, ” Kennedy said in March 1986 of the future 20-year senator and attorney general. “He is, I believe, a disgrace to the Justice Department ….”
If that overwrought style has a familiar ring to it, it’s no surprise — Kennedy was just warming up his character assassination act.
Just a bit more than a year later, he unleashed his scurrilous and unforgivable attack on Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork in his infamous “Robert Bork’s America” speech. In that, he twisted Bork’s attempts to explain his constitutional reasoning into a deliberately deceptive description of Bork as favoring back-alley abortions, segregated lunch counters and police breaking down bedroom doors. In so doing, he forever chilled any hope that future court nominees would be forthright in responses about their judicial philosophies.
In Warren’s remarks last week, she said, “I will stand with Senator Kennedy” regarding the Sessions nomination. I’m not an expert on the life and beliefs of Jeff Sessions, but based on what we all know of Ted Kennedy’s integrity, I’d be pretty careful about standing with him on anything.
This column isn’t about Kennedy or Sessions, though … it’s about Elizabeth Warren.
Some people read her performance in last week’s confirmation debate as a deliberate attempt to goad McConnell into action, so that she could assume a Joan of Arc pose and kick off her 2020 presidential campaign. The immediate fundraising letter seems to back that up.
If that’s true, it worked. McConnell stumbled right into her trap.
Or, maybe not.
Another way to look at it is that McConnell was giving her enough rope to hang herself in the eyes of American voters. Take another look at the video. Is that the kind of attitude and political philosophy you want to live with for four years?
Last November, the American people didn’t so much embrace Donald Trump as they rejected Hillary Clinton’s liberal, we-know-what’s-best-for-you approach to governing.
And if Clinton didn’t pass muster with the voters, it’s hard to imagine that they could warm up to Warren’s even more left-wing, socialist idea of how we ought to live and be ruled. I’m confident that she’ll seize plenty more opportunities to pound that into our heads over the next four years.
Ted Diadiun is a member of the editorial board of cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.
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