Senator Elizabeth Warren, after quoting from a decades-old letter written by Martin Luther King Jr’s widow, was ruled in violation of Senate rules late Tuesday night, an extraordinary rebuke that silenced her from further debate on the nomination of Jeff Sessions as attorney general.
She read a 1986 letter from Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr., who had accused Sessions of “a shabby attempt to intimidate and frighten elderly black voters.”
“Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as a federal judge,” King wrote to the then-chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.
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Read the full letter below: