WASHINGTON — The Senate had two things to do last week — pass a bill cracking down on sex slavery, and vote on the nomination of Loretta Lynch to be attorney general — and it did neither of them.
Barring an eleventh-hour weekend compromise, Lynch, the top federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, who would become the first black woman to serve as attorney general, will wait until at least mid-April before a confirmation vote is held.
Democrats have tried to turn the unusually long wait to their political advantage by portraying the delay as tied to Lynch’s race and gender.
At an event Wednesday at the Capitol, female senators and activists framed the holdup as part of a Republican “war on women.” On the Senate floor, the second-ranking Democrat said Lynch is being “asked to sit in the back of the bus when it comes to the Senate calendar” — an unmistakable reference to civil rights icon Rosa Parks.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., showed no sign of caving to Democrats, announcing his intention Thursday to move on to the federal budget Monday, thus pushing back the Lynch nomination until after a two-week recess set to begin Thursday.
President Barack Obama blamed a dysfunctional Senate and “stubbornness on the part of Republicans” for the delay.
“You don’t hold attorney general nominees hostage for other issues,” Obama told The Huffington Post in excerpts released Friday. “This is our top law enforcement officer. Nobody denies that she’s well-qualified. We need to go ahead and get her done.”
Rudy Giuliani, the former Republican mayor of New York,
held a conference call Friday with reporters and defended Lynch as being “in the highest traditions of a U.S. attorney” and “not a political operative in any sense.”
The most recent obstacle has been the Democrats’ failure to address a controversial anti-abortion provision tucked into an otherwise innocuous bill addressing human trafficking before it reached the floor. McConnell is delaying the Lynch nomination until the anti-trafficking bill is completed as leverage to break the Democratic opposition to the abortion language.
Bloomberg News contributed to this report.
