Assistant Democratic Leader Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) said that the silencing of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) was a carefully orchestrated Republican plot. If this is the case, then the scheme has horribly backfired on Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and his party.
Politico reported that Sen. Durbin suspected that Republicans planned to silence Warren:
Democrats were surprised by the turn of events, which Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said “appeared to be carefully orchestrated on their side.” Late last year, Cornyn suggested Warren had violated Senate rules that he said “prohibited the sort of ad hominem attack, the claims of corruption, selling legislation for campaign contributions” when Warren attacked a medical research bill.
“Sen. Warren has a special talent to get under the skins of Republicans,” Durbin said. “I’m sure her speeches bother them more than the speeches of many Democrats.”
It would seem that Republican Sens. McConnell and Cornyn have been looking to silence Sen. Warren for quite a while. The fact that McConnell would choose to enforce a rule that is hardly ever enforced while Warren read a letter into the record suggests that Republicans had been targeting Sen. Warren and looking for an opportunity to flex their male GOP majority entitlement for a while.
The idea that this was a plot to target Warren makes even more sense when one considers that three male Senators were allowed to finish reading the Coretta Scott King letter into the record with no objections from Republicans. The rules violation was never about the letter that Warren was reading. The silencing was all about punishing Sen. Warren for speaking out. The Republican Senate old boys club wanted to put her in her place.
In reality, silencing Warren probably made McConnell and senior citizen Viagra set cronies in the majority feel good, but it was one of the dumbest things that he could have possibly done.
Sen. McConnell unleashed a firestorm that took an already angry and motivated Democratic Party to a new level. Thoughts of taking back the Senate in 2018 have moved to the front of Democratic minds.
Majority Leader McConnell silenced Elizabeth Warren, and now Democrats are ready to take back the Senate from Mitch McConnell.
