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Tuesday was yet another awful day in Baby Fists’ America. Despite being utterly unqualified, Betsy DeVos was confirmed by a margin of one vote (VP Pence’s tiebreaking vote) to be the new Secretary of Education. The White House released a list of terrorist attacks which they claimed had received little-to-no attention, except they “forgot” to include terrorist attacks committed by white people. Kellyanne Conway went on CNN and got into it with Jake Tapper, and I’m more convinced than ever that CNN should just stop interviewing her altogether. And a federal court heard oral arguments on Trump’s Muslim Ban.

So, everything sucks and America is in pain. What we need now is a brutal confirmation fight over appointing a white supremacist to be the nation’s top lawyer, right? The confirmation for Jeff Sessions’ appointment to be Attorney General started yesterday. Senator Elizabeth Warren is one of many Democratic senators who want no part of Jeff Sessions. Sen. Warren tried to make a speech in which she quoted Ted Kennedy and read a letter from Coretta Scott King, all about Sessions’ history of voter disenfranchisement and racism. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell shut it down and the Senate (voting on party lines) formally rebuked her. They literally took a vote to get Liz Warren to STFU.

Senate Republicans passed a party-line rebuke Tuesday night of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for a speech opposing attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions, striking down her words for impugning the Alabama senator’s character. In an extraordinarily rare move, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) interrupted Warren’s speech, in a near-empty chamber as debate on Sessions’s nomination heads toward a Wednesday evening vote, and said that she had breached Senate rules by reading past statements against Sessions from figures such as the late senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and the late Coretta Scott King.

“The senator has impugned the motives and conduct of our colleague from Alabama,” McConnell said, then setting up a series of roll-call votes on Warren’s conduct.

In setting up the votes to rebuke Warren, McConnell specifically cited portions of a letter that King, the widow of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., wrote to the Senate Judiciary Committee in opposition to Sessions’s 1986 nomination to be a federal judge.

“Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens,” King wrote, referencing controversial prosecutions at the time that Sessions served as the U.S. attorney for Alabama. Earlier, Warren read from the 1986 statement of Kennedy, a senior member of the Judiciary Committee who led the opposition then against Sessions, including the Massachusetts Democrat’s concluding line: “He is, I believe, a disgrace to the Justice Department and he should withdraw his nomination and resign his position.”

The Senate voted, 49 to 43, strictly on party lines, to uphold the ruling that Warren violated Rule 19 of the Senate that says senators are not allowed to “directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.” Pursuant to that rule, Warren was ordered to sit down and forbidden from speaking during the remainder of the debate on the nomination of Sessions.

“I am surprised that the words of Coretta Scott King are not suitable for debate in the United States Senate,” Warren said after McConnell’s motion.

[From WaPo]

As you can imagine, this is not going over very well. #LetLizSpeak trended on Twitter all night, and it’s still trending this morning. This is literally a bunch of old white guys telling a woman to sit down and shut up. And they did it when she was trying to read a letter from Coretta Scott King, one of the most admired women in the history of our country!!!

A US Senator isn’t allowed to read a letter by a civil rights icon but our President is allowed to attack one. #LetLizSpeak. #StopSessions pic.twitter.com/Up4H4NWDII

— Tracy Wehringer (@twehringer) February 8, 2017

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