Elizabeth Warren Talks Jeff Sessions on The Daily Show

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Elizabeth Warren continued to revel in the national spotlight last night after Republicans’ now-infamous vote to cut off her anti-Jeff Sessions testimony on the Senate floor. In an appearance on The Daily Show  last night, she said she thinks that effort to silence her has backfired.

The main thing is that millions of people are now reading Coretta Scott King’s letter. It is an amazing letter. It’s a letter full of passion, it’s a letter full of heart, and it’s a letter full of advice to us. It talks about a moment in history when African Americans were beaten away from the polls, and it talks about Jeff Sessions’ role in that. And I think it has an important lesson today for all of America. I hope everybody reads her letter‑that’s Coretta Scott King’s letter-talking about why it is so important to have public officials who actually believe in equal rights and equal opportunities for all of us.

The Senate, along party lines, voted to cut Warren off while she was reading aloud a letter critical of Sessions written by King, the widow of Martin Luther King, Jr.  Senators invoked a rule forbidding senators from impugning the motives of a fellow senator. She had also read from a critical letter written by the late Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, and had been warned to stop.

King, the widow of Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote the letter in 1986 arguing that Sessions should not be appointed a federal judge. In that case, the Senate did ultimately reject Sessions’ nomination. King died in 2006. You can read the letter here.

This time around, Democrats did not manage to block Sessions’ appointment to the post of Attorney General, and a similar effort to block Trump’s pick for Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, also failed.

But Warren made the case to Daily Show host Trevor Noah that a sustained effort to rally supporters can pay off, and that she believes the debacle “helped us have a better democratic conversation.”

“We don’t have the votes in the United States Senate to block somebody like Jeff Sessions,” she says. “What we have to do is count on people all around this country to make their voices heard.”

It’s been a big week on The Daily Show for Massachusetts Democrats. Warren’s appearance came just a day after Boston Mayor Marty Walsh defended “sanctuary city” protections on the show, following his headline-grabbing promise to house immigrants targeted by the Trump administration at City Hall, if it comes to that.