Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) thought he was giving a valid reason for the Senate’s decision to silence Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) on Tuesday night. In reality, he inspired a feminist rallying cry for Democrats opposed to President Donald Trump and his attorney general nominee, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL).
#ShePersisted: social media erupts after Mitch McConnell silences Elizabeth Warren
McConnell’s own words became a rallying cry for Warren.
“She was warned. She was given an explanation,” McConnell said. “Nevertheless, she persisted.”
It’s that last part that quickly caught fire on social media, almost immediately trending as #ShePersisted as soon as the words were public.
Here’s the background: Earlier on Tuesday, Warren tried to read a letter by Coretta Scott King, a civil rights activist and wife of Martin Luther King Jr., written in opposition to Sessions’s 1986 nomination to a federal judgeship. (Sessions has a history of opposing civil and voting rights legislation, making him a major threat to civil rights advocates — not just back in 1986 when he was nominated for a judgeship, but today as he’s nominated to head the Justice Department, which enforces civil rights laws.)
McConnell and other Republicans found the letter offensive, arguing that it breached decorum against a fellow senator — since Sessions isn’t just Trump’s attorney general nominee, but a senator as well. So after Republicans warned Warren, McConnell invoked Senate Rule XIX, which prevents any senator from using “any form of words [to] impute to another Senator … any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.” That effectively prevented Warren from talking any further about the Sessions nomination on the Senate floor.
Many people took this as an act of censorship and tyranny — the Senate majority leader using an arcane rule to silence a senator who is merely voicing a civil rights hero’s and her own disapproval of Trump’s attorney general nominee. So they began blasting his own words in a hashtag — #ShePersisted — by citing other women, from Harriet Tubman to Leia Organa (from Star Wars), who resisted oppression.
Here’s some of how that looked on Twitter:
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