Democrats are stepping up pressure on Republicans to confirm her, but they haven't been blameless, either. Minority Leader Harry Reid's strategy to use procedural maneuvers to box in Republicans on the homeland security funding fight yielded a victory in that battle, but it also kept the Republican majority from moving on other issues, like the Lynch nomination. (The Senate can do more than one thing at once, but like Reid before him, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn't need much excuse for inaction.) Now, Democrats are holding up bipartisan anti-human-trafficking legislation over abortion language that they claim Republicans snuck into the bill. GOP lawmakers counter, with some legitimacy, that Democrats simply didn't read the bill closely enough when it came out in January, since they raised no objections when they approved it unanimously in committee.

What does an abortion fight have to do with Loretta Lynch? Well, McConnell had said she would finally get her confirmation vote this week, but in an effort to get Democrats to relent on the trafficking bill, he said Sunday on CNN's State of the Union that Lynch would be "put off again" unless that legislation was done. "By continuing to stall Lynch's nomination Republicans are failing yet another basic test of their ability to govern," Reid spokesman Adam Jentleson said in response. Lynch's nomination can be brought to the floor at any time, he noted. "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." Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, on Monday called the delay "unconscionable" and "unexplained."

As Jentleson pointed out, the 128 days that have passed since Obama selected Lynch in November are the longest that any attorney general has had to wait since the Senate took more than a year to confirm Edwin Meese in 1985. Will Republicans pay a larger political price for the delay? Democrats briefly tried to use the 50th anniversary of the Selma march earlier this month as a tool to pressure Republicans, implying that the GOP would look racially insensitive by stalling the nomination of the first black woman to be attorney general. “You don’t think we notice that?” Reverend Al Sharpton said of the delay during a rally in Selma.

Raised in North Carolina, Lynch had to share the honor of class valedictorian with two white students because high school administrators feared that having a lone black honoree would cause controversy. Yet it's hard to find any racial undercurrent in the GOP opposition to Lynch (unlike, for example, the 2009 criticism of Sonia Sotomayor's "wise Latina" comments that consumed the debate over her nomination to the Supreme Court). Even Republicans who have come out in opposition to her nomination praised her effusively during her confirmation hearing, a further indication that the delay is more about Obama than her.