Senate Democratic Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin of Illinois cut off Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton Thursday during the committee’s hearing to consider President Joe Biden’s race-obsessed nominee for associate attorney general, Vanita Gupta.
Cotton began his remarks with approval from Chairman Durbin to speak for “10 to 15 minutes,” before the Republican senator was cut off before the 10-minute mark to force a roll call vote.
“The simple truth here is that Vanita Gupta is not fit to serve in the Department of Justice,” Cotton said, going on to highlight Gupta’s Senate testimony when Cotton pressed her on which races she held racist biases against. Gupta had said, “I think that we all have implicit biases and racial biases.”
“So, Ms. Gupta, I ask you, against which races do you harbor racial bias?” Cotton asked the nominee to oversee the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during her confirmation hearing.
While Cotton re-counted her testimony and made the case for Gupta’s rejection, Durbin forced the committee to move forward with a vote.
“We’ve been notified there’s going to be the two-hour rule invoked, and we have four minutes left before that happens. I’m afraid we have no choice but to call the roll,” Durbin said, speaking over Cotton which provoked objections from Republicans.
Before I could finish convincing my Democratic colleagues to vote against Vanita Gupta, Senator Durbin cut off my remarks and forced her through the Judiciary Committee despite the rules—the Senate equivalent of pulling a fire alarm to escape a test in high school. pic.twitter.com/qiK0D3piAb
— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) March 25, 2021
The committee proceeded to a vote, where Republicans, including Cotton, reiterated their objections to the vote as invalid when offering their up or down answer on Gupta’s nomination.
Despite objections by my colleagues on the committee, Senator Durbin forced a sham roll call vote—both violating the rules and making it clear the Democrats know Gupta’s nomination is on life support. But what goes around comes around @SenatorDurbin. pic.twitter.com/z4pKDQMewo
— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) March 25, 2021
The committee vote ultimately ended in an 11-11 tie for Gupta’s nomination, leaving it up to Senate leadership whether her consideration would move forward for a full-chamber decision.
Senate Republicans demanded a second hearing for the nominee this week after claims Gupta allegedly mislead members of the committee on her views related to qualified immunity, drug decriminalization, police funding, and the death penalty.
All 11 Republican members of the Judiciary Committee wrote to Durbin that Gupta’s testimony featured contradictory statements on “defunding the police” in particular which were out of line with earlier comments made last summer.
“In some cases, she doubled down on her misleading statements from the hearing, and in others, she refused to answer altogether,” Republicans wrote. “In ‘response’ to scores of our questions, she merely copied-and-pasted the same inapplicable, general statements for one question after another.”
In testimony offered earlier this month, Gupta said, “I do not support defunding the police. I have, in fact, spent my career advocating, where it’s been necessary, for greater resources for law enforcement for things like body-worn cameras, officer wellness, and safety programs, and any number of measures.”
In June testimony, however, Gupta said she believed in the “shrinking [of] the footprint of the criminal legal system, including police, in black and brown people’s lives.”
Gupta has also advocated banning police from schools and encouraged more censorship from progressive allies ruling Silicon Valley’s big tech empire, in the name of civil rights.
