(The Washington Post) – Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) invoked a famous African American woman to make a point about the delay in confirming an African American woman as attorney general.
“And so, Loretta Lynch, the first African American woman nominated to be attorney general, is asked to sit in the back of the bus when it comes to the Senate calendar,” Durbin said on the Senate floor Wednesday morning. “That is unfair. It’s unjust. It is beneath the decorum and dignity of the United States Senate. This woman deserves fairness.”
Durbin, of course, was comparing Lynch to Rosa Parks, the civil rights icon who in 1955 refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger.
Lynch was nominated in November 2014, but the GOP-controlled Senate has held up her confirmation, holding her nomination hostage to make points, first about their disagreement with President Obama’s executive action on immigration and now about a sex-trafficking bill that Democrats oppose over abortion restrictions.