https://youtube.com/watch?v=6hFQV7N2CHo
Senator Elizabeth Warren has garnered a great deal of attention for being formally silenced on the Senate floor after reading a letter by Coretta Scott King accusing Senator Jeff Sessions of racism, a violation of Senate Rule XIX which prohibits imputing another Senator’s motives. Warren’s supporters are outraged, but on CNN, former senator Rick Santorum explained to Alisyn Camerota why this was normal and proper:
CAMEROTA: Rick, in your time as senator did you ever see something like that happen — what happened to Elizabeth Warren last night?
SANTORUM: As a matter of fact I did, and I would say that on one or two occasions, Rule XIX was brought up when I was up on the floor going after some folks. Rule XIX is there like other rules — for example, you can’t refer to a senator directly by their name, you have to refer to them as the gentle lady or gentleman from a particular state. The whole reason for these rules is to keep the temperature down and to keep decorum in the Senate and make it a deliberative body, so you don’t have personal attacks and you’re not directly addressing the senator, accusing them or something. So all of this is in place and has been for hundreds of years to keep the temperature down.
Look sometimes you get a little heated when you get up on the floor and you directly address a senator. You call them out directly on something, and they say, “You can’t do that,” and then you back off, and in the case of Elizabeth Warren she didn’t back off. She made those comments. She said that she agreed with those comments, and she suffered the consequence.
The letter Warren was reading strongly implied that Jeff Sessions was a racist — a repetition of the accusation Ted Kennedy deployed to prevent Sessions from being confirmed for a federal judgeship in 1986. Democrats have held fast to this notion, even as the basis for it has been revealed to be false.
Rule XIX states, in part, “No Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.” Any ambiguity about whether Warren was doing this was immediately cleared up afterward, when she tweeted this:
I will not be silent about a nominee for AG who has made derogatory & racist comments that have no place in our justice system.
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) February 8, 2017
Her defenders have chosen to move the goalposts, now arguing that Mitch McConnell should have just let the rules violation continue. With fawning media coverage portraying her insults as a heroic crusade, it’s helpful that Santorum is around to explain how Senate-floor proceedings actually work.