Loretta Lynch won the Senate’s confirmation on April 23, 2105, to serve as U.S. Attorney-General, ending months of delay.J. Scott Applewhite/The Associated Press
Federal prosecutor Loretta Lynch won confirmation Thursday to serve as U.S. Attorney-General, becoming the first black female to hold the top U.S. law enforcement post.
The 56-43 vote by a Senate that forced her to wait more than five months for the title and remained divided until the end installs Lynch, 55, as head of the Justice Department. She will replace Eric Holder, a perennial lightning rod for conservatives who was once held in contempt of Congress. She is expected to be sworn in next week.
Lynch will inherit a department consumed by efforts to stop the flow of Islamic State recruits to Syria and prevent destructive computer crime against American corporations. And she'll arrive with the department at the centre of dialogue on relations between police and minority communities.
Lynch will have limited time in the twilight of the Obama administration to craft ambitious new policy proposals and is seen as unlikely to depart in radical ways from Holder's priorities. But supporters expect her to bring her own understated and low-key management style, and she sought to assure anxious Republicans in recent months that she would arrive in Washington with her own law-and-order perspective
The vote total for Lynch, the U.S. attorney in New York, was the lowest for any attorney general since Michael Mukasey won confirmation with 53 votes in 2007 after Democrats decried his refusal to describe waterboarding as torture.
For Lynch, the issue that tore into her support with Republicans was immigration and her refusal to denounce President Barack Obama's executive actions limiting deportations for millions of people living illegally in this country. Questioned on the issue at her confirmation hearing in January, she said that she believed Obama's actions were reasonable and lawful.
Democrats angrily criticized Republicans for using the issue against her, but Republicans were unapologetic.
The long delay in confirming Lynch since she was nominated in November incensed Democrats, with Obama himself weighing in last week to lament Senate dysfunction and decry the wait as "crazy" and "embarrassing." There were various reasons for the delay, most recently a lengthy and unexpected impasse over abortion on an unrelated bill to combat sex trafficking.
Yet Democrats controlled the Senate when Lynch was nominated last November and could have brought up her nomination for a vote then. They held off with the Republicans' encouragement after being routed in the midterm elections, and spent the time confirming judges instead.
There was an expectation that Republican leaders would move Lynch's nomination swiftly this year, especially since most Republican members of Congress loathe Holder, who's seen as too politically close to Obama and even more liberal. But instead, the nomination became tangled in the dispute over Obama's executive actions on immigration, and seemed to stall.
Lynch, who grew up in the state of North Carolina, has been the top prosecutor since 2010 for a district that includes Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and Long Island, a role she also held from 1999 to 2001.