Elizabeth Warren: We Will Not Be Silenced on Voting Rights

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren tells Ryan Grim what went through her mind when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell used an arcane Senate rule to prevent her from reading a letter written by Coretta Scott King, widow of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., opposing the nomination of Jeff Sessions to the federal bench in 1986.

Sessions, who became a U.S. Senator from Alabama after being rejected for that judicial appointment, was confirmed as the U.S. Attorney General a few hours after this interview was recorded, but the firestorm created by McConnell's action meant that millions of Americans are now reading and listening to the words of Coretta Scott King, and, in the estimate of Ryan Grim, the resulting public awareness means that attempts to implement voting restrictions to protect Republican power will be harder to achieve.

FULL TEXT OF KING'S LETTER:

“Anyone who has used the power of his office as United States Attorney to intimidate and chill the free exercise of the ballot by citizens should not be elevated to our courts,” King wrote in the cover page of her nine-page letter opposing Sessions’s nomination, which failed. “Mr. Sessions has used the awesome powers of his office in a shabby attempt to intimidate and frighten elderly black voters. For this reprehensible conduct, he should not be rewarded with a federal judgeship.”

Thirty years later, Sessions, now a senator, is again undergoing confirmation hearings as President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general, and he is facing fierce opposition from civil rights groups.

In the letter, King writes that Sessions’s ascension to the federal bench “simply cannot be allowed to happen,” arguing that as a U.S. attorney, the Alabama lawmaker pursued “politically-motivated voting fraud prosecutions” and that he “lacks the temperament, fairness and judgment to be a federal judge.” She said Sessions’s conduct in prosecuting civil rights leaders in a voting-fraud case “raises serious questions about his commitment to the protection of the voting rights of all American citizens.”

“The irony of Mr. Sessions’ nomination is that, if confirmed, he will be given a life tenure for doing with a federal prosecution what the local sheriffs accomplished twenty years ago with clubs and cattle prods,” she wrote, later adding, “I believe his confirmation would have a devastating effect on not only the judicial system in Alabama, but also on the progress we have made toward fulfilling my husband’s dream.”

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