Tuesday, April 21, 2015

What passes for progress

It seems a deal has been struck in the Senate to move forward on an anti-sex trafficking bill.
 
Republicans have been using this bill as an excuse not to vote on the nomination of Loretta Lynch for Attorney General. Yes, Republicans hate Eric Holder so much that they have forced him to say on as AG rather than vote on his immensely qualified replacement. So far, Ms Lynch has been waiting for a vote for 164 days, more than twice as long as the last five AG’s combined. This reveals that Republican complaints about Holder were not serious – being nothing more than political theater, they really weren’t in all that much hurry to replace him.
 
Apparently Republicans in the Senate are unable to walk and chew gum (it’s rumored that as a birth control measure, Senator McConnell’s wife used to give him a stick of gum at bedtime), so it wasn’t possible for them to have a vote on Ms Lynch before the sex trafficking bill was finalized. And in order to ensure it took as long as possible for that bill to clear, Senate Republicans inserted a clause that would force victims of sex trafficking to bear any children conceived from being raped by their victimizers, rather than allow fees paid (not tax money) to be used for abortions.
 
Details of whatever resolution has been reached are not yet available, though they should be coming out later today. The Senate should now be able to take up Ms Lynch’s nomination in the next few days, unless someone has given Mitch McConnell a stick of gum.