US CAPITOL — Jeff Sessions is a busy man, but he’s not so busy as Betsy DeVos is.
Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell needed Sessions, the unreconstructed junior senator from Alabama, to get billionaire DeVos confirmed as Secretary of Education, so Sessions did his Republican duty. DeVos only got to be Secretary of Education when Vice President Mike Pence broke the 50-50 tie on her nomination.
Then, McConnell opened debate on the nomination of Sessions to be Attorney General.
That’s when Massachusetts’ senior senator, Elizabeth Warren, began delivering a lengthy speech against the nomination of Sessions, a sitting senator.
In her speech, Sen. Warren referred to a letter written to the Senate by Coretta Scott King in 1986, in opposition to the nomination of Sessions as a United States District Judge In Alabama.
Mrs. King wrote, “Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office [as United States Attorney] to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as a federal judge… This simply cannot be allowed to happen."
That’s when the Senate voted, 49 to 43, to make Warren sit down and shut up.
But that was only the beginning. Associate solitary reporter Maggie Smith, who covers Congress for us, was only mildly surprised to see Secretary DeVos stride directly onto the floor of the Senate, confront Warren (who was sitting undemurely in her seat) and announce loudly, “Lizzy, now that I’m running all the public schools in the country — especially in Boston – I want you to be the first to know what I’m going to do."
Warren stood up and glared at DeVos.
“First of all,” DeVos said, “I’m privatizing all the public schools, starting in Boston.”
“Next, I’m gonna convert Boston Latin Academy, which is a public high school in the birthplace of the Tea Party, into Grizzly Academy. Grizzly Academy will be, for three weeks only, a charter school, and then I will change it into a private school financed by the NRA. Grizzly Academy will be staffed by NRA members who will teach the students there (as long as they are white students) how to use assault weapons.”
“That’s how we’re going to make America great again!”
For once, Warren was speechless, as McConnell and the entire leadership of the Republican Senate Conference (including Colorado’s junior senator, Cory Gardner, the Chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee) applauded vigorously.
Write a comment