Last Call For Operation Lynch Pinned

Why no, Senate Republicans are not going to allow a vote on Loretta Lynch as Attorney General, nor will they suffer any consequences for continuing to refuse to allow it. Why do you think they keep moving the goalposts?

Republican leaders have tied a vote on Lynch to the passage of an unrelated bill targeting sex trafficking. That bill, which normally would be bipartisan, has stalled for weeks because Republicans tucked an anti-abortion provision into it that Democrats won’t support. As long as the bill doesn’t move, neither does Lynch. 

“The Senate should pass this bipartisan bill right away,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) said Tuesday. “And as soon as that happens, we’ll turn to the Loretta Lynch nomination.” 

But it’s not that simple, and there’s no end in sight to the abortion fight. The Senate is voting Thursday to take up an amendment that Republicans say is a way forward on the impasse, but Democrats call it a gimmick and vow to oppose it. 

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), the bill’s author, will offer to tweak the bill’s language relating to the Hyde Amendment, the federal provision that bans the use of public funds for abortions except in cases of rape or incest. But the tweak doesn’t address Democrats’ core concern that the bill, for the first time, would expand the Hyde Amendment to apply to non-taxpayer funds. The bill would allow fees collected from human traffickers to be funneled into a new public fund for victims, to which the Hyde Amendment would be applied. 

Democrats say any expansion of the Hyde Amendment is a non-starter for them.
“Senate Republicans are trying to restrict the health choices of women and girls who have been sold into sex slavery,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). “The latest proposal from Senator Cornyn does nothing to change that fact. He is still attaching Hyde to non-taxpayer, offender dollars.”

So no, Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans have made it clear that until the Democrats fold on expanding Hyde to victims of human trafficking, Lynch will never get a vote. For now anyway the Dems are hanging in there, but Loretta Lynch is the one paying the price, and nobody seems to give a damn (certainly not the Villagers.)

But this is the extent that our “smaller government” friends on the other side of the aisle will go to in order to control women’s bodies. Not only do we have to further shame victims of modern slavery, we have to bring them in for judgment from a bunch of wrinkled old white guys too just to try to flip off President Mandingo Reallyfromkenya from even appointing people to his own cabinet.

Compassion, thy name is the Republican Party.