About 20 African-American women marched into Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s Capitol Hill office Thursday morning to demand that the Kentucky Republican set a vote to confirm Loretta Lynch as Attorney General.
Lynch has waited 138 days for a confirmation vote in the Senate, and it now looks like she may have to wait still longer, until after Congress’s two-week recess.
“Today we have come to press forward on justice,” said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas. “We don’t know what is going on the United States Senate – we are not here to point a finger.”
Leslie Proll, director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, noted that McConnell “could hold the vote if he wanted to and that is very important to have the top law enforcement officer in the country confirmed.”
The women met with McConnell’s chief of staff prior to the march, but as they approached the office, McConnell declined to speak with them.
“What they’ve said is he is not available; he’s too busy doing other work and we say back to that, there is no other work more important than this,” Proll said.
President Barack Obama nominated Lynch to the position Nov. 8, to replace Attorney General Eric Holder. Senate Democrats failed to act on her nomination while they were still in the majority. Now, Lynch’s wait is longer than any Cabinet nominee since Ronald Reagan’s choice of Edwin Meese III for Attorney General in 1984.