Senator Blackburn criticizes Senator Durbin for obstructing subpoenas

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., criticized Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin, D-Ill., for calling votes to advance two judicial nominees to the Senate on Thursday without allowing requests to speak from Blackburn and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.

GOP members of the panel eventually left the room before Durbin called a vote to authorize subpoenas for a major conservative donor and a well-known conservative activist over their ties to conservative members of the Supreme Court, but did not wait to hear Blackburn’s request for subpoenas for information about Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s book deal and disgraced billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.

“This is a sad day in the history of the prestigious Judiciary Committee and further underscores the Left’s two tiers of justice crusade,” Blackburn said in a press statement Thursday afternoon after the meeting. “Senate Democrats have long been trying to undermine the Supreme Court and Justice Clarence Thomas, but want to ignore Justice [Sonia] Sotomayor allegedly using her taxpayer-funded staff to coordinate speaking engagements in exchange for selling and promoting thousands of her books.”

Blackburn also claimed that Democrats “don’t want to have a conversation about the estate of Jeffrey Epstein to find out the names of every person who participated in Jeffrey Epstein’s human trafficking ring.”