Loretta Lynch survived a long and bitter battle Thursday as the Senate voted to confirm the North Carolina native as the first African-American woman to serve as U.S. attorney general.
Lynch, whom President Barack Obama nominated last November, will replace retiring Attorney General Eric Holder, the first African-American to hold the high-profile post. Ten Republicans voted for her.
Supporters and Democrats hailed the ascension of Lynch, born in 1959 in Greensboro, just a year before black students sat at a whites-only lunch counter in the city and helped spark the civil rights movement.
Her father, a Baptist minister, along with red-jacketed members of her sorority, Delta Sigma Theta, watched from the gallery as the Senate voted largely along partisan lines, 56-43, to approve Lynch. Ten female members of the Congressional Black Caucus, all members of the House of Representatives, crossed the Capitol to watch the vote from the Senate floor.
“The Senate finally confirmed Loretta Lynch to be America’s next attorney general – and America will be better off for it,” Obama said afterward.
Senate Democrats – most of whom made their “yes” votes audible – chastised Republicans for forcing Lynch to wait for a vote, pointing to a Congressional Research Service report that said she’d waited longer from nomination to confirmation than all but two nominees in the history of the country: Edwin Meese, under President Ronald Reagan, and A. Mitchell Palmer, under President Woodrow Wilson.
While Democrats wanted everyone to hear their support for Lynch, Republicans, including Sens. Richard Burr and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Lynch’s home state, cast their “no” votes discreetly.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who’d delivered a floor speech denouncing Obama and Holder earlier in the day, and who’s been one of Lynch’s chief antagonists, did not vote. His fellow GOP presidential hopefuls, Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted against her confirmation.
The 10 Republican senators who voted for Lynch included Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Thad Cochran, R-Miss., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
Among other Lynch supporters on the Republican side of the aisle were three who face re-election in 2016, a presidential election year, and come from politically troublesome or unpredictable states: Sens. Mark Kirk of Illinois, a Democratic state, Kelly Ayotte and Rob Portman, from the swing states of New Hampshire and Ohio, respectively.
When the final vote was called, members of Lynch’s sorority burst into applause and cheers, although the Senate’s presiding officer had warned that expressions of approval were not allowed.
“We didn’t foresee anything like this,” her 83-year-old father, the Rev. Lorenzo Lynch of Durham, N.C., said afterward, surrounded by his daughter’s jubilant Senate allies. “We discovered very early that she was smart and creative.”
Republicans made it clear before the vote that their displeasure was not with Lynch herself, but with the president who nominated her.
Cruz, like Lynch a Harvard Law graduate, said she’d refused to reject Obama’s executive action on immigration, which would shield millions of immigrants from deportation. The order is being challenged in court.
Cruz said Lynch’s deference to her predecessor outweighed her record as a prosecutor.
“She chose to embrace the lawlessness of the Holder Justice Department,” the Republican presidential contender said.
Sen. Dan Sullivan R-Alaska, praised Lynch’s background but said in a statement after the vote that she “has been unconvincing that she would put the law and the Constitution above defending the president’s policies, many of which I believe have undermined the separation of powers.”
Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., a centrist Democrat from a red-leaning state, decried the refusal to support Lynch because she sides with Obama.
“We have a new test: You must disagree with the president who nominates you,” she protested.
She questioned how any president could assemble a Cabinet if he can’t nominate people who agree with his policies.
“It is beyond depressing. It is disgusting,” McCaskill said, displaying an intensity of rhetoric rare in a chamber that still tries to operate under traditional rules of decorum, even in an era of toxic partisanship.
McCaskill, a former prosecutor, called Lynch, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, a “prosecutor’s prosecutor,” adding that she’d “prosecuted more terrorists than almost anyone else on the planet.”
Lynch takes the helm of the 116,000-person Justice Department at a time when it faces a myriad of challenges, from frayed relations with Capitol Hill to its aggressive investigations into a spate of deadly incidents that have sown deep mistrust between police and minority communities.
When Obama nominated Lynch in November, he noted that as a federal prosecutor she’d successfully gone after terrorists who’d plotted to bomb the Federal Reserve Bank and the New York subway, and took on public corruption and bank fraud. But he said one of her proudest achievements was leading a civil rights prosecution of officers involved in the assault of Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant living in New York.
“She is not about splash, she is about substance,” Obama said at the time.
Civil rights leaders had suggested Lynch’s race played a role in the months of delay – though Republicans pointed out that she’ll be replacing Holder, who’s also black. The vote came after a compromise was reached on an abortion provision in an anti-human-trafficking bill that had divided the parties and delayed a vote for weeks.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., invoked race in her remarks, calling the delay in the confirmation vote “particularly sensitive” because Lynch will be the first African-American woman to lead the Justice Department.
“If you look at race relations today and the impartial and important role that the Department of Justice plays, it seems to be that her appointment may well be the most important possible appointment at this particular point in time,” Feinstein said.
Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the most senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, noted that Lynch had overcome lingering racial prejudice: In grade school, she scored so high on a standardized test that her teacher made her take the test again. She scored higher. In high school, the principal thought it would be too controversial to have a black valedictorian, so Lynch agreed to share the distinction with a white student.
Leahy suggested that those old prejudices had cast a cloud over her confirmation vote.
“Loretta Lynch is a historic nominee,” he said. “What I worry about is this body making history for the wrong reasons.”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said Lynch’s upbringing, including the high school slights, had prepared her for the contentious confirmation battle.
“That is a woman who has been through something and can wait this out,” Klobuchar said, adding, “Well, she waits no longer after today.”
Lindsay Wise, Marissa Horn and William Douglas contributed to this report.