Republicans took issue when Warren quoted from a pair of letters written by the late Coretta Scott King and the late senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) opposing Sessions’s ill-fated nomination to a federal judgeship in 1986. King’s letter accused Sessions of racial bias; Kennedy’s called him a “disgrace to the Justice Department.”
It was all too much for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who said Warren had “impugned the motives and conduct of our colleague from Alabama.” In an extraordinary move, the Senate voted on party lines to shut her down, as The Washington Post’s Paul Kane and Ed O’Keefe reported.
The mechanism used to silence Warren is known as Rule 19, an arcane and seldom invoked provision in the rules of the Senate. The rule states that senators may not “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.”
What, exactly, does it mean for one senator to “impugn” or “impute” another? That’s a matter of perspective, as congressional Democrats and other Warren defenders made clear when they rallied behind her on Twitter, launching the hashtag #LetLizSpeak to the top of the site’s trending list.
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