Opinion: Mitch, please: Elizabeth Warren was criticizing a nominee, not a colleague when you told her to sit down and shut up

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will rue the day when he moved to shush Sen. Elizabeth Warren for trying to read a 30-year-old letter from Coretta Scott King critical of Sen. Jeff Sessions, President Trump’s nominee for attorney general.

In the letter, the wife of the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had opposed Sessions’ failed bid for a federal judgeship. As a U.S. attorney, King wrote, Sessions had “used the awesome powers of his office in a shabby attempt to intimidate and frighten black voters.”

Within hours of the Republican majority’s silencing of Warren for violating a Senate rule against impugning the motives of a fellow senator, Warren supporters had made a meme of McConnell’s justification for shutting her up: “She was warned; she was given an explanation. Nevertheless she persisted.”

But put aside the partisan and gender optics of the gagging of Warren and the fact that the King letter was later read without incident by several male senators. Rule XIX, the rule designed to keep senators from attacking one another, was absurdly misapplied in this situation.

The rule states: “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.”

The original intent of the rule, if you will, was to preserve comity and focus the attention senators on substance rather than ad hominem arguments. But Warren was commenting on Sessions not as a colleague but as the nominee to a position in the executive branch; his character (as perceived by Mrs. King) was central to her argument.

McConnell should have let this slide.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook