Four months ago, Senator John McCain called Loretta Lynch, who is 55, “a very outstanding young woman” and said he “would imagine” that she would win Senate approval to replace Eric Holder as US attorney general.
That was then. On Friday, McCain announced he would not support Lynch. On Sunday, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell announced a new delay in a vote on Lynch’s confirmation, after what had already been, by some measures, a historic delay in bringing her nomination to the Senate floor.
It has been four months since Barack Obama first named Lynch as his preferred successor to Holder, but only about half that long since her nomination was re-submitted at the start of the new Congress, under its new Republican leadership, this past January.
With four Republicans openly supporting her, it appears Lynch has enough votes to be confirmed. But first the Republicans, who, as the majority, control the Senate schedule, must agree that the vote be held.
McConnell’s announcement on Sunday was an about-face from Friday, when he said the Senate would likely vote on Lynch this week. A new complication – or bad-faith delay, from the Democrats’ perspective – arose in the form of partisan disagreement about an abortion-related plank in a bill to combat human trafficking.
McConnell held the disagreement out as a reason to further suspend the Lynch vote.
“This will have an impact on the timing of considering a new attorney general,” he told CNN. “I had hoped to turn to her next week, but if we can’t finish the trafficking bill, she will be put off again.”
Should Lynch, a nominee whose qualifications as a prosecutor none in Congress have openly challenged, succumb to sideline partisan disagreements, the episode would set an early high standard for gridlock in the 114th Congress and seem competitive across an even longer term for laurels for legislative dysfunction.
Lynch still has a clear path to the top of the Justice Department. As long as none of the four Republicans who have said they will support her do not change their minds, and safely assuming the support of all 44 Senate Democrats and the two independents who caucus with them, Lynch would procure 50 “aye” votes, enough for a tie-breaker vote by the vice-president to push her over the top.
That’s much closer than the tally was originally expected to be. Donald Wolfensberger, director of the Congress Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a former Republican staff director of the House rules committee, said the Lynch nomination had suffered from continuing disenchantment in Congress with Holder, and from the timing of executive actions on immigration taken by Obama.
Lynch was nominated on 9 November; the president’s latest announcement of unilateral immigration reform was on 20 November.
“Her nomination has been sort of the victim of circumstances not directly related to her qualifications,” Wolfensberger said. “The Republicans’ attitude toward Holder, there’s some residual bitterness there. The other piece is the whole immigration issue … there is that whole well-poisoning that is the result of the president’s November immigration order that has impacted her.”
On Sunday, McConnell revealed yet another piece: Republican-sponsored legislation that would set up a fund to compensate victims of sex trafficking. The bill was considered a shoo-in until Democrats discovered it contained language that would ban funds being used for abortions. Such language in other legislation, likely in this case as in others to apply to very few real-world instances, has triggered automatic Democratic dissent. It was not immediately clear how the two sides could “finish” the bill, as McConnell put it, and move on to Lynch.
That Lynch’s nomination would be held up by legislation meant to protect sex-trafficking victims could be seen as ironic, given that some of Lynch’s most distinguished work as a US attorney has been in prosecuting international sex trafficking cases, including a major case in 2012 with a Mexico nexus in which 52 defendants were indicted and 100 victims were rescued.
It might also seem ironic that Republicans would hold up the Lynch nomination over their continuing objections to Holder. Holder has said he will stay in the job until he is replaced.
Republican objections to Lynch, however, have explicitly never been as much about Lynch as about the president and his policies. The new Republican majority assumed control of the Senate in January, vowing to find a way to block Obama’s executive actions on immigration. An effort to do that by putting homeland security funding on the line failed miserably earlier this month. The Lynch nomination was originally seen as insulated from that fight, but now it clearly is not.
“She’s had an outstanding record as a US attorney and I think everybody recognizes that, that she’s a top-caliber person from the standpoint of professionalism and character and so on,” Wolfensberger said.
Supporters of Lynch portray her nomination as urgent, saying her role as lead prosecutor in a case of unusually vicious police brutality, the 1997 Abner Louima case, showed her to be capable of handling policing reform in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere.
“Loretta is going to be, I think, someone who can help strengthen the relationship between law enforcement and the community,” said Kenneth P Thompson, who worked on the Louima case with Lynch and now is the Brooklyn district attorney. “She is going to be fair to the police, she is going to be fair to the community.”
There is a historic resonance to the Lynch nomination as well. She was among the first wave of black students to enter public schools in Durham, North Carolina, in the mid-1960s, after desegregation. She would be the first African American woman to serve as attorney general.
“At every stage in her career, Loretta has followed the principles of fairness, equality, and justice that she absorbed as a young girl,” Obama said in a statement at her nomination ceremony. “She was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, the year before black students there sat down at a whites-only lunch counter, helping to spark a movement that would change the course of this country.”
At her confirmation hearing in January, Texas senator Ted Cruz asked Lynch whether she agreed with analysis by the White House office of legal counsel that backed the president’s deferral of deportation for an estimated 5 million undocumented migrants.
“I did find the analysis to be reasonable,” Lynch said.
McCain, who represents the border state of Arizona, is one of 24 Republican senators up for re-election in 2016 for whom perceived softness on immigration could invite a primary challenge from the right. On Friday, McCain tied his “nay” vote on Lynch to the immigration issue.
“No, he’s not voting for her,” a McCain spokesman said in a statement first obtained by Breitbart News, “because she called the Obama executive action on immigration ‘reasonable’.”
