Finally last week, Loretta E. Lynch, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, was confirmed as the nation's attorney general on a 56 to 43 vote, with 10 Republicans voting for her.
It was a highly politicized five-month demonstration of congressional dysfunction. Not Washington dysfunction, as we so often term it, but specifically congressional dysfunction.
In general, Republicans were caught between wanting to replace Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., and giving President Obama something he wanted.
Though they generally agreed that Lynch was qualified for the job, they opposed her because she defended President Obama's executive actions on immigration.
Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky, held up the nomination until the Senate voted on a human trafficking bill, adding weeks to Lynch's confirmation wait. The human trafficking bill didn't have much drama of it's own, of course. It passed Wednesday by a vote of 99 to 0, so it seems clear the delay was simply designed as a rebuke to the president.
At least Tennessee's Sen. Lamar Alexander was honest about his vote.
"Today I voted against President Obama's nomination of Loretta Lynch for attorney general of the United States because it was an opportunity, within the Senate rules, to express my disapproval of the president's abuse of executive authority," Alexander said in a statement last week.
But then he went on to describe the president's executive order as "amnesty," which it is not: A prioritization for deportations and a set of timed requirements (often dubbed "a pathway") to obtain citizenship for working undocumented immigrants who have lived peacefully and productively in the U.S. for more than five years is not amnesty.
Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, too, voted no on Lynch's confirmation -- just as he had said he would in a news release back in March.
"The job of the U.S. attorney general is to enforce federal laws as written, not as the administration wishes they were written," said Corker. "While I believe Ms. Lynch is an impressive attorney and a committed public servant, nothing revealed during our personal meeting or at her confirmation hearing has assured me that she will be an independent attorney general and refrain from selective enforcement of the law, and therefore I will not be supporting her confirmation."
In other words, his vote was also more about the president than about the attorney general.
For a president who Republicans have so often tried to label weak and ineffective (just to name a few of the nicer terms), our Congress members certainly spend a lot of their valuable time and valuable votes just in efforts to prickle him.