Finally: Loretta Lynch to get Senate vote on nomination as attorney general

After five months of delay, a clown show of nomination hearings, a derailment into anti-abortion politics and general Republican slow-walking obnoxiousness, the Senate will hold a confirmation vote for Loretta Lynch's nomination to be attorney general. That will be an historic vote—Lynch is the first African-American woman nominated to the position. It'll also be historic because she's had the longest wait for a vote of any nominee to the position in recent memory. But that's after two hours of "debate" this morning, in which the Senate will be mostly in a quorum call waiting for someone to show up to actually talk about the nomination, a cloture vote, another two hours of "debate" and finally a final vote scheduled for 2:00ish, ET. So, how did we get here?

In November, right after the election, President Obama gave the nod to Lynch to replace out-going Attorney General Eric Holder and as the first African-American woman to serve in the position. At the time, all the news outlets noted that she had already received two confirmation votes from the Senate to serve as U.S. attorney, one in 2000 and another in 2010. But right out of the box, there was trouble. Trouble in the form of Sen. Ted Cruz, who demanded that her vote be delayed until the new Republican Senate was sworn in in January. For a variety of reasons—Harry Reid's desire to confirm as many judicial nominations as possible and lots of praise from other Republicans which suggested they would play nice on Lynch—Cruz got his wish.

Then the clown show began. Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley announced the witness list, a bunch of right-wing kooks who had nothing really to say about Lynch, but really, really hated Eric Holder and whose primary purpose in public life is to keep brown people from voting. But first there had to be a day of Loretta Lynch trying to prove she's not Eric Holder. Then the committee turned to the "witnesses" in a hearing that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) so aptly condemned, as nothing more than "a sound bite factory for Fox News and conspiracy theorists everywhere."

Hearings over and the nomination cleared by the committee, McConnell waited a few weeks to figure out how to keep Lynch languishing. They came around to the idea that it would be over immigration. That got them through February and half of March, when McConnell decided he had to shift tactics and hold her hostage to a completely unrelated anti-abortion fight in the human trafficking bill.

Then, of course, they had to take a two-week vacation, and couldn't spare the half day before leaving to hash this through. Vacation over and the final necessary Republican vote secured to assure her confirmation, Republican leadership still played politics. At one point, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) suggested that they would just have to put her off until they dealt with other, completely unrelated legislation on Iran. That was the final straw for even Republican observers, including Jeb Bush, who were getting pretty embarrassed by the whole ugly debacle of a bunch of old white men making a pawn of this highly qualified, African-American woman.

So here we finally are today, nearly five months later, with Lynch just having to put up with one more day of Republican foot-dragging. The actual vote could be dispensed with in under an hour, but that would be too easy, so they will go through unnecessary procedural delays, just to make one last nasty point.