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Senators, Do Your Job

Ruth Marcus on

WASHINGTON -- Let's get a few things straight about the delay in confirming Loretta Lynch as attorney general. It's outrageous. It also has nothing to do with her race or gender.

Contriving prejudice where none exists demeans the importance of fighting discrimination. And it demeans those who drop such ugly hints.

To wit, Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, who complained that "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" this after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell held her nomination hostage to action on a stalled human trafficking bill.

Oh, please. I'm not in the habit of agreeing with Rich Lowry of National Review, but opposing Lynch is no more race-based than Durbin's own opposition to the nomination of Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state.

That's not to say that lawmakers are bias-free. This is impossible to prove, but to watch Attorney General Eric Holder testify before Congress makes me think that, at times, he is treated with less respect than if he were white.

But relations between Holder and congressional Republicans are badly frayed; it is in those fraught moments of tension that prejudices, perhaps subconscious, emerge. There was no such atmosphere during the Lynch hearings,

 

Same with gender. Hillary Clinton raised the subject last week, tweeting, "Congressional trifecta against women today: Blocking great nominee, 1st African American woman AG, for longer than any AG in 30 years."

Please, again. I'd like to see one smidgen of evidence that Lynch's gender is working against her.

So the Lynch delay is about ideology. But not her ideology -- President Obama's. And the Justice Department's. The case against Lynch is the case against the president's executive actions on immigration, and the fact that Lynch said she agreed with the Justice Department's analysis of their legality.

Which raises the question: How could Republican senators reasonably expect Lynch to take a different view? How could they expect Obama to name any nominee who differed? If they can't, what is the point -- other than as a vehicle for expressing pique -- of opposing Lynch?

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