Stephen Colbert wonders why Elizabeth Warren was the only senator silenced this week

(Image credit: Late Show)

last updated 9 February 2017

The big news of the day was the Senate confirming Jeff Sessions as attorney general, Stephen Colbert said on Wednesday's Late Show, but all the real drama happened Tuesday night, when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made Sen. Elizabeth Warren sit down and be quiet, using the Senate's arcane Rule 19. "They kept her from reading a letter from Coretta Scott King," Martin Luther King Jr.'s widow, criticizing Sessions on black voting rights, he explained. "It's all part of the GOP's February message: Happy Black History Month, now shut up about the bad stuff."

"So, to recap: These days, a black person can't get their message heard even when a white person is saying it — unless that white person is a guy," Colbert said, "because this morning a bunch of white male senators were allowed to read excerpts from King's letter on the Senate floor. Of course, the men weren't silenced; that would violate Senate Rule 18: Bros before hos."

Colbert turned to the kerfuffle over Nordstrom deciding to dump Ivanka Trump's clothes and accessories. "Apparently the clothes weren't selling well, and dropping an underperforming brand is a decision any businessman would understand — except one," he said, reading Trump's Nordstrom tweet and Press Secretary Sean Spicer's defense of said tweet. "This is crazy — this is insane! You can't use the power of the office of the president to protect a family business, all right?" Colbert said. "That would be like Jimmy Carter making all of us drink Billy Beer, or that would be like George Bush invading a country that had oil — you can't do it." He ended trying to decipher another Trump tweet — "EASY D, which I think used to be Trump's rapper name back in the '80s" — and patting CNN's Jake Tapper on the back for a job well done. Watch below. Peter Weber

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.