The Obama administration, ever eager to inject race into a debate in order to call conservatives racists, is coyly denying charges that the GOP-controlled Senate is holding up Loretta Lynch’s nomination for the post of attorney general because she is black.
But a closer look at the remarks emanating from the administration reveal an insidious method of crying racism in a subtle manner by refusing to acknowledge the GOP’s reasons for the delay, while letting their minions in Congress make the charges.
On Wednesday, “press secretary Josh Earnest was asked five times” whether the delay of the Senate vote on Lynch was due to her race. He responded, without mentioning the GOP’s stated reasons for the delay, “I think that the delay we have seen from Senate Republicans is indefensible. I think you’d have to ask them about why they think this delay is somehow in the best interest in the country. I feel very confident in telling you that it is not.”
The same day, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), through Bloomberg News, issued this threat: if the Senate does not confirm Lynch, it would be “yet another sign” that race relations were still a problem.
Eric Holder, echoing Earnest, insinuated there might be an itty-bitty kind of racism, just not a huge one, telling MSNBC, “My guess is that there is probably not a huge racial component to this, that this is really just D.C. politics, Washington at its worst. A battle about something that is not connected to this nominee — holding up this nominee. I think that’s the main driver here.”
But Dick Durbin had said on March 18, “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.” He was followed last week by Rep. Corrine Brown (D-FL), who told CNN, “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck, and it is clear to me that there is hidden racism rampant in the House and the Senate.”
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) asked Durbin to apologize, noting that in 2005, Durbin held up the nomination of an African-American woman, Janice Rogers Brown, to a federal appeals court. McCain stated, “The senator from Illinois voted against the historic nomination. I would never suggest, even with veiled rhetoric, that Judge Rogers Brown’s race was the reason for the senator from Illinois’ opposition to her nomination. He should extend that same courtesy to me and my colleagues.” Durbin refused to apologize.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has clearly stated that the reason for the delay is the Democrats’s own stalling on a human trafficking bill, which they refuse to pass because of language dealing with abortion. His spokesman Don Stewart stated of the delay, “The only thing holding up that vote is the Democrats’ filibuster of a bill that would help prevent kids from being sold into sex slavery.”
Earnest concluded with another round of accusing without accusing, stating, “I know that there have been a number of people who have tried to figure out an explanation for this indefensible delay. There are a lot of theories. I frankly don’t have a lot of clarity about why we would continue to delay the nomination of an individual who has strong bipartisan support and who is eminently qualified for this very important job.”
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