Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Sunday that there won’t be a vote to confirm Loretta Lynch as attorney general until senators resolve a stalemate over a human trafficking bill.
"It’s not a threat," McConnell, R-Ky., said on CNN’s "State of the Union. "We need to finish the human trafficking bill that came out of the judiciary committee unanimously…We need to finish that, so we have time to turn to the attorney general, because, the next week, we will be doing the budget, and the next two weeks after that, Congress is not in session."
While McConnell blamed Democrats for stalling on the bill, Democrats accused Republicans of stalling on Lynch’s nomination to replace Eric Holder as attorney general.
"By continuing to stall Lynch’s nomination Republicans are failing yet another basic test of their ability to govern," said Adam Jentleson, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. "There is nothing stopping the Senate from confirming Lynch and continuing to debate the trafficking bill this week, except Senator McConnell’s unwillingness to bring her nomination up for a vote."
The Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act was supposed to be a bipartisan no-brainer – a measure to clamp down on sexual abuse and to protect children and adults from being bought and sold as sexual slaves.
But the bill, authored by Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, stalled last week because of a Democratic filibuster. Democrats accused Republicans of sneaking anti-abortion language into the bill. Republicans denied the accusation and charged Democrats with failing to read the bill, which had been posted for months.
McConnell said Democrats “need to come to grips with this.”
“I offered them a simple up-or-down vote if they wanted to take out language that they all voted -- that they all voted for three months ago,” he told CNN’s Dana Bash.
Jentleson said “No more excuses, no more delays. Confirm Loretta Lynch now.”
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