WASHINGTON — Loretta Lynch’s wait to become U.S. attorney general ended Thursday with the Senate voting to confirm the veteran New York prosecutor five months after President Barack Obama submitted her nomination to Congress.
The vote was highly anticipated for numerous reasons: Lynch’s status as the first black woman to be nominated for the post; the high-profile role the Justice Department has played in national concerns over race and policing, and the unusual delay — the longest for an attorney general nominee in 31 years.
In the end, the margin was wider than had been expected. Ten Republicans, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, joined the Senate’s 44 Democrats and two independents in supporting Lynch. Forty-three senators, all Republicans, were opposed.
Colorado’s senators split on the vote. Sen. Michael Bennet, a Democrat, voted for confirmation. Sen. Cory Gardner, a Republican, was opposed.
Lynch is expected to be sworn in as the nation’s 83rd attorney general on Monday.
Obama said in a statement that “America will be better off” with Lynch in charge of the Justice Department. “She will bring to bear her experience as a tough, independent, and well-respected prosecutor on key, bipartisan priorities like criminal justice reform,” he said.
Outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, stepping down after more than six years, said Lynch would be “an outstanding attorney general, a dedicated guardian of the Constitution, and a devoted champion of all those whom the law protects and empowers.”
Getting the Senate to a final vote had been a slow and rancorous affair, with Obama deeming the spectacle “embarrassing” last week. It gave Democrats frequent opportunities to lambaste McConnell over a span of months.
“I guess I was naive in thinking my Republican colleagues would treat Loretta Lynch with the dignity that she and her office deserve,” Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said on the Senate floor. “Perhaps my mistake was forgetting that for Republicans, this isn’t about Loretta Lynch. It’s about President Obama.”
Obama nominated Lynch, 55, to replace Holder in November. The Senate, then under Democratic control, did not act on the nomination, preferring to spend precious time in the lame-duck session on judicial appointments that party leaders thought would stall in a Republican-controlled Senate.
A Republican Senate, the thinking went, would not dawdle in confirming a replacement for Holder, a frequent target of Republican enmity. That proved not to be the case.
During questioning before the Senate Judiciary Committee in January, Lynch said she thought Obama’s executive actions on immigration last year passed legal and constitutional muster, angering Republicans who considered them an overreach.
“Ms. Lynch has said flat-out that she supports those policies and is committed to defending them in court,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., on Thursday. “So I think Congress has a real role here. We do not have to confirm someone to the highest law enforcement position in America if that someone is publicly committed to denigrating Congress.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said that, under Lynch, “We are sadly going to see more and more lawlessness, more recklessness, more abuse of power, more executive lawlessness.”
Cruz was the only senator absent when the vote was called Thursday. His spokeswoman, Amanda Carpenter, did not explain why Cruz missed the confirmation vote. An invitation on his campaign website showed he had a fundraiser in Dallas to attend.
After the January hearing, it took nearly a month for the panel to advance Lynch’s nomination, and once it did, the nomination became caught up in an unrelated political dispute.
An otherwise noncontroversial bill to combat sex trafficking became stuck on the Senate floor after pro-abortion-rights Democrats objected to provisions that would extend existing federal restrictions on abortion funding to a new victims’ compensation fund. At that point, McConnell tried to force Democrats to accept the language by tying Lynch’s nomination to the anti-trafficking bill’s passage.
The move incensed Democrats, some of whom spoke in racial terms about what they saw as shabby treatment of a pioneering black woman. Obama showed increasing exasperation as the delay mounted.
The deadlock broke Monday when party leaders agreed to restrict the victims’ fund to non-medical purposes, making trafficking victims instead eligible for health care under an existing federal program already subject to abortion restrictions.
