Charges and Evidence

Democrats and the Left are up in arms over the silencing of Senator Elizabeth Warren.  She read from a 1986 Coretta Scott King letter which was opposed to Jeff Sessions who was then before the Senate Judiciary Committee as a candidate for a federal judgeship.  In the letter, King focuses on conduct and her own opinion of its consequences, by saying that Sessions had used his power as a prosecuting attorney to "intimidate and chill the free exercise of the ballot" and furthermore, to "intimidate and frighten elderly black voters" (full letter here).  Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader, invoked rule 19 prohibiting the direct or indirect maligning of a fellow Senator's character to stop Warren's speech.

I personally don't think Warren's recent use of Coretta Scott King's words rises to the level of impugning character.  People are allowed to have opinions, even wrong ones.

What strikes me, however, is the media and the Left's reaction.  A representative example comes from King's alma mater, Antioch College, whose VP for Diversity and Inclusion, who is also the director of the campus's Coretta Scott King Center for Cultural and Intellectual Freedom issued a statement the day after, objecting to the invocation of rule 19 (which is fair) on the grounds that no woman should ever be silenced for any reason.

We rebuke any and all attempts to silence women. And we encourage all women to continue to use their voices to demand equality and justice.

The charge that Sessions is a racist actively attempting to suppress the black vote is a serious one, to be sure.  By extension, the charge that McConnell and the entire GOP establishment is sexist is also a serious one.  The demonization of the political opposition seems the standard modus operandi of the Left, who are quick to believe every evidence of their own assumptions of political opponents' motives, without seemingly ever entertaining the thought that the weight of the evidence should count more than the seriousness of the charge, or that their own assumptions about what motivates others might itself be the root cause of ill-will, calumny, and divisiveness.  It's striking then, but not surprising, that in the CSKC denunciation of the Senate's silencing of both Warren and King, no questioning of the substance of the charges, no investigation of the truth at issue, and no balance whatsoever in presenting facts is the order of the day.

The questions never asked, but only concluded upon, include these:

• Is it true that Sessions is a racist black vote suppressor?  On what grounds can we call him that?    Is there merit to that characterization?
• Is it true that Warren is being silenced because of her gender, or is it because of the content of her words going beyond the bounds of the rules?  On what grounds can we judge that?  Is there merit to the accusations of sexism?

In the Media's rush to keep the silencing of Warren and of a Civil Rights icon on the front page, they have multiplied the angles of attack, but at each turn, if you ask the pertinent questions about the merits of the charges, and the evidence, there's always something missing from the Media narrative:

• Rule 19 was created to prevent fisticuffs, and is rarely invoked ERGO McConnell and the GOP are whiny sexist bigots, snuffing out a woman's speech under false pretenses that it rises to violence-inciting personal insult.
• EXCEPT that Senator Warren has been allowed to speak within the exact same time and decorum limits as all her male Senator counterparts since her admission to the Senate, as has ever other female Senator.  There's no evidence to the contrary anywhere else in the Senate record.  If they were really sexist women silencers from the beginning, their record is remarkably ineffective, since they take almost no occasion to silence either her or any other female co-legislator.
• Sessions prosecuted a voter fraud case in 1984 that he lost, in which a black defendant was found not guilty of tampering with absentee ballots ERGO he and the GOP are racists and serial abusers of power.
• EXCEPT that the accusing party was ALSO black, and BOTH parties were Democrat, and a majority black Grand Jury impaneled based on similar complaints of fraud against the same defendant in a previous Democrat primary election found grounds to move the case forward.

Even in more in-depth "serious" media investigations into the reasoning behind King's letter, like that of the NYT, conveniently elide the fact that the case was black on black, Democrat on Democrat, and that Sessions' role was to prosecute against voter fraud to PREVENT voter suppression, not the opposite, as they claim.

King wrote a letter, yes, but a balanced study of its content reveals that it too was a partisan charge with no merit--she was merely a partisan for the defendant in the case, finding common cause with him on Civil Rights issues, but having no personal knowledge of whether or not he had committed the frauds alleged against him.  Her letter amounts to 9 pages of guilt-by-association, with copious amounts of her own credential stroking, name-dropping, Civil rights history re-telling, and barely a scant 2 paragraphs on the fact that Sessions was the prosecuting attorney on the opposite side of her chosen champion as the only logical grounds on which she felt he should be disqualified from further federal service.

There's no there there.

The CSKC statement only confirms its own assumptions with its own assumptions when it finds the link between silencing women and suppressing votes symptomatic of a nonexistent desire of all Republicans everywhere to deny basic freedoms to women and minorities, when it points out that:

What happened on the Senate floor yesterday eerily resembles the sentiments expressed in Mrs. King’s letter.

Instead, what's really eerie, is how deeply the Left believes spurious charges just because they fit its own narrative with zero critical reflection on the weight of the evidence.  What happened in the reaction to what happened on the Senate floor demonstrates that this facile demonizing, conclusion-leaping, judgmental Left must deny or distort truth in order to hold onto its beliefs.

Luckily for the Right, some of us still seek truth, still don't believe charges until firm and trustworthy evidence is before our eyes, and still question assumptions, even our own.