After a record delay filled by stark partisan warfare and charges of racism, Loretta Lynch was confirmed on Thursday as the next US attorney general in a narrow Senate vote.



Lynch’s nomination passed 56-43, with 10 Republicans crossing party lines to support her. Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, missed the vote after making a speech against Lynch on the Senate floor on Thursday morning.

Lynch, the US attorney for the eastern district of New York, was nominated by Barack Obama last November to replace Eric Holder, who was the first African American attorney general in US history. Lynch will be the first African American woman to hold the office.

“Today, the Senate finally confirmed Loretta Lynch to be America’s next attorney general – and America will be better off for it,” Obama said in a statement after the Senate vote.



Holder said he was “pleased” and congratulated Lynch in a statement released after the vote.

“I have known and worked closely with Loretta for many years, and I know that she will continue the vital work that this Administration has set in motion and leave her own innovative mark on the department in which we have both been privileged to serve,” Holder said in the statement.

The presumptive next Democratic minority leader, Chuck Schumer, called Lynch “someone who has excelled at every stage of her education and career”.



“If there’s an American dream story, Loretta Lynch is it,” Schumer said, adding that Lynch would be especially effective at navigating tricky police brutality cases.

“In some of the most difficult cases, cases with police on one side and the community on the other, she emerged with fair decisions that made both sides praise her,” Schumer said.

But the congratulations could not obscure the months of partisan acrimony that preceded them, which began in earnest after Lynch’s confirmation hearing in January before the judiciary committee.



The Democratic Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, said before the vote: “While I’m pleased that Ms Lynch will be confirmed as attorney general, her nomination process is proof of all that is wrong with Republican leadership. Senate Republicans made Loretta Lynch’s nomination linger more than 10 times longer than the average attorney just to spite the president.”

“I am sad. I am depressed,” said Claire McCaskill, a Democrat from Missouri, on the Senate floor before the vote. “Because what we are about to see is base, ugly politics at its worst. Doesn’t get any uglier than this. Because what my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are saying is: you can take one of the most qualified attorney general nominees in history – doesn’t make any difference. We have a new test. You must disagree with the president who nominated you.”



At her confirmation hearing, Lynch was asked by Cruz – now a Republican presidential candidate – whether she agreed with analysis by the White House office of the legal counsel supporting the president’s actions to defer deportation for millions of undocumented migrants.

“I did find the analysis to be reasonable,” she said.

Cruz and other Republicans seized on the comment to paint Lynch as a partisan actor instead of an impartial proponent of the law – an assessment countered by decades of cases in which Lynch, as a federal prosecutor, repeatedly took on and defeated some of the country’s most insidious criminal networks. As US attorney, she broke up human trafficking rings, investigated government corruption, sent accused al-Qaida conspirators to prison and dismantled the mafia in the local region.

Owing to the strength of her prosecutorial record, which her opponents never contested, and to her reputation as a team player beloved and respected by colleagues, the Republicans’ months-long refusal to schedule a vote on Lynch began to strike some Democrats as motivated by something deeper than run-of-the-mill partisanship.

The last straw for Dick Durbin, the minority whip, came when the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, announced in mid-March that the Lynch vote would have to wait until the Senate resolved a squabble over abortion language in a human trafficking bill. The legislation had no logical bearing on the Lynch nomination, except insofar as she was reputed to be one of the country’s most stalwart defenders of victims of sex trafficking.

Durbin took the Senate floor and compared Lynch to Rosa Parks, the African American woman whose refusal to give up a bus seat to a white passenger in 1955 helped set off the civil rights movement.

“And so, Loretta Lynch, the first African American woman nominated to be attorney general, is asked to sit in the back of the bus when it comes to the Senate calendar,” Durbin said. “That is unfair. It’s unjust. It is beneath the decorum and dignity of the United States Senate. This woman deserves fairness.”

The cry of injustice failed to move the nomination forward until Tuesday, when senators announced they had reached a compromise on the abortion spat. “It certainly shouldn’t have taken this long,” said Patty Murray, the Democratic senator who brokered the deal.

“What I’m worried about is that the Senate is making history for the wrong reasons,” said Senator Patrick Leahy on Thursday.

Lynch has at least 21 months, the time remaining in Obama’s presidency, to make her mark as attorney general. She could serve longer, if Obama is succeeded by a Democrat.

Lynch was nominated 167 days ago. The longest previous confirmation wait for any modern attorney general was 30 days for Alberto Gonzales, a George W Bush nominee, in 2005.