Sen. Dick Durbin Gets Historical in His Advocacy for Loretta Lynch

Washington Informer March 19, 2015

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Attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch is escorted by her security detail on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2015, as the Senate Judiciary Committee takes a break during her confirmation hearing. She is now the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. If confirmed, Lynch would replace Attorney General Eric Holder, who announced his resignation in September after leading the Justice Department for six years. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

(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.