McConnell’s silencing of Warren was brilliant

February 8, 2022 By Senate

John Fund,

Yes, Mitch McConnell’s slapdown of Elizabeth Warren was justified but…

The delay and denounce tactics of Democratic senators finally got to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Tuesday night, he used a seldom-deployed  rule to end the speech Senator Elizabeth Warren (R-Mass.) was making against the confirmation of fellow Senator Jeff Sessions for attorney general. McConnell was upheld 50 to 43 in his view that Warren’s speech impugned the character of Sessions, but his move was politically awkward since it focused even more attention on Warren’s critique.

What Warren had done was quote from a pair of letters written by the late Coretta Scott King and the late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) opposing Sessions’ failed nomination to a federal judgeship in 1986. King’s letter accused Sessions of racial bias; Kennedy’s called him a “disgrace to the Justice Department.” Senator McConnell said such statements fell afoul of a 1902 Senate rule banning a senator for impugning the character of a fellow senator.

 warrenshutup_small1 McConnell's silencing of Warren was brilliant Senate

“McConnell got Warren to shut up; but he lost the war,” Democratic consultant Joe Trippi told me. “No one would have been talking about her late night criticism if he hadn’t made an issue of it.”

Warren made the “gag rule” a cause celebrate on social media, and attracted some nine million impressions.

Adding to questions about the wisdom of McConnell’s move, former George W. Bush aide Brad Blakeman notes that both letters had been placed in the Congressional Record back in the 1980s making it difficult to say they were inappropriate merely because they now referred to a sitting senator.

Right now, Democrats believe they are keeping faith with their base by pursuing a strategy of scorched earth fights over every Trump nomination.  No other president has seen so few of his cabinet nominees appointed at the three-week mark of his first term.

A new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll shows that just 56 percent of Democrats believe their party’s members of Congress should block all legislation or nominees for government positions. Still, just 34 percent of Democratic voters want their party’s elected officials to find ways to work with a President Trump.  “Democratic incumbents know they risk a left-wing primary challenge if they are seen as cooperating with President Trump” says Trippi.

That explains why a Democratic Senator like Jon Tester of Montana has announced he will oppose Jeff Sessions for Attorney General. “Trump may have carried Montana easily,” Trippi told me. “but he [Tester] has to worry about a primary race from his left wing first.”

The Warren-McConnell dustup illustrates just how the growing polarization in the senate is likely to continue. Democrats don’t have the power to stop many Trump initiatives or block his appointments, but they have to be SEEN as fighting them at every turn.  That is likely to lead to Republicans to take more steps to shut down debate in order to keep the Senate moving forward. That in turn will only increase the cycle of anger and polarization that is gripping Washington.

John Fund is a columnist for National Review. Follow him on Twitter @JohnFund.



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  • DrArtaud

    Yesterday, I wrote about women in principally male dominated workplaces, a few that I have known, with great leadership and personal skills. But one thing I have seen, and I alluded to it, is that, at times, guys will do things due to peer pressures and these women would not; largely, I think; since there were too few women to create these peer pressures. Yet these women were exceptionally intelligent and capable leaders.

    But one thing that even I have accepted in collective male behavior can be summed up by this simple abbreviation, crude as it is. Some women, seriously, cannot STFU (shut the F up). I represented union safety, and was watching a job being performed that required 2 mobile cranes, lifting a giant steel beam, and in a coordinated fashion, set it into place. As I’m watching, a supervisor, nearing the job, eventually puts himself under the suspended beam, starring up at it, a violation to the 10th power of safety rules since a rigging or crane failure will drop it on him, likely killing him. My jaw was probably sagging looking at his stupidity, and I was about to say something, when I feel a tap at my shoulders. It’s another supervisor, overseeing the job, and he says “I see what you’re starring at, it will be taken care of”. That sufficed for me, the supervisor under the beam needs spoken too about his stupidity.

    If Elizabeth Warren was at work that day, she’d been saying the obvious, over, and over, and over. That’s not business like, it’s not properly political, but it is something that afflicts many women, namely that they find it impossible to stop talking when the point has been made. Rules is rules in the Senate, don’t disparage other Senators abusively. And indeed, of democrats, Ted Kennedy murdered a woman, likely raped others, Robert Byrd was a KKK member, and president clinton was, IMHO, clearly a rapist that has done women much harm. But all Warren can cackle about is someone’s historical opinion of Sessions. This is why some guys, when listening to a woman, resort to putting their fingers in their ears and mouthing la la la la la la etc., or that repeat what their wife says in a shrill voice emulating their wife. It’s not what they said, but the incessant number of times that they said it.

    Video: Scrubs Elliot’s Elizabeth Warren’s Annoying Voice Starts at 30 seconds