Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) ripped Attorney General Jeff Sessions from the Senate floor on Wednesday, a year after Republicans voted to censure her over remarks about the then-senator.
“On Jeff Sessions’s watch, the Justice Department has promoted voter suppression. On his watch, the Justice Department has endorsed discrimination. … And on his watch, the Justice Department has led an all-out bigotry-fueled attack on immigrants and refugees,” Warren said from the Senate floor.
Warren shot into the spotlight last year after Senate Republicans voted to temporarily block her from speaking from the floor, citing the Senate’s rules against impugning the character of a fellow senator.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) now-famously explained the decision, saying, “She was warned. … Nevertheless, she persisted.”
Warren referenced the incident, saying she was “booted off the Senate floor” for reading a passage from Coretta Scott King’s 1986 letter opposing Sessions’s judgeship.
Warren also knocked Sessions — “a man deemed too racist to hold a federal court judgeship in 1986” — over his record on voting rights, noting he had “embraced President Trump’s make-believe, fact-free conspiracy theories around voter fraud.”
Sessions was President Trump’s first supporter in the Senate when Trump was a candidate, but fell out of the president’s favor last year when he recused himself from the FBI’s investigation into potential ties between Russia and the Trump campaign.
Warren said the “ultimate irony” was Trump “turned on” Sessions.
“Sessions has groveled but Donald Trump will never forgive the sin of failing to serve Donald Trump personally,” he said.