Recapping a very busy day in Trumpocalypse, Stephen Colbert opened Late Show talking about the muzzling of Sen. Elizabeth Warren on the floor of the Senate, when she had tried to read a letter about our new Attorney General Jeff Sessions written by Coretta Scott King.
After deep diving on that subject, Colbert blasted President Donald Trump’s anti-Nordstrom tweet from the White House’s POTUS Twitter handle.
“This is insane, you can’t use the power of the office of the President to protect a family business!” Colbert ranted. “That would like Jimmy Carter making all of us drink Billy Beer. Or George Bush invading a country that had oil – you can’t do it!”
Previous night, when Sen. Sessions’ inevitable confirmation still was going through the motions of being debated on the floor of the Senate, Elizabeth Warren kicked off her 2020 presidential campaign, getting up to read a 1986 letter from King. The letter criticized Sessions’ record on civil and voting rights. The letter had packed quite a wallop back in the day; it’s credited with helping deny Sessions a federal judgeship. Decades later, GOP senators told Warren to shut up and sit down, rather than let her read the letter penned by the widow of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King. All part of the GOP’s Black History Month celebration, Colbert snarked.
“A black person can’t get their message heard even when a white person is saying it,” the late-night host noted. Unless that white person is a guy – because, the next morning, a bunch of white male senators read excerpts of the letter on the floor of the Senate without incident.
To stop Warren, the GOP senators had invoked Rule 19, which prevents a senator from impugning another senator on the floor, Colbert explained. “It’s like saying, ‘If you can’t say anything nice, you’re probably talking about Jeff Sessions.”
Shush-Mob leader Mitch McConnell, Colbert noted, had defended silencing Warren, saying, “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted” which, faster than you can say “Really?” had become a clarion call to protest, on Twitter.
