Earl O. Hutchinson

Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell said that a vote will finally come April 23 on Attorney General-nominee Loretta Lynch.

It probably will happen this time.

The GOP has been pounded, lambasted and pulverized for weeks by President Obama, Democrats and every civil rights group around for shamefully stalling Ms. Lynch’s confirmation. She has the distinction, courtesy of the GOP, of having her nomination held hostage to anti-Obama, hard-core partisan politics longer than any attorney general nominee since the Reagan administration.

The issue has never been Ms. Lynch’s legal and administrative credentials. They are impeccable. The issue is not really the trumped up issue that Sen. McConnell and GOP leaders claimed was the reason for the unconscionable foot-dragging on her confirmation. The issue is their die-hard, take-no-prisoners assault on President Obama.

Even when Ms. Lynch is confirmed, that won’t change. The first long and loud warning that Ms. Lynch would be held as a hostage to the GOP’s assault on President Obama’s policies came virtually the moment he announced that he had chosen her to replace Attorney General Eric Holder. GOP Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ted Cruz, both of whom sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee, publicly made it clear that they are ticked off that President Obama would tap Ms. Lynch when many Democrats are lame ducks, thus not giving the incoming wave of GOP Senate members a chance to have their say on her confirmation. This was in December.

They then snatched at yet another ploy. They harped that she was supposedly close to Al Sharpton and met with him during the protests around the chokehold death of Eric Garner by New York police. This quickly morphed into the wild, irresponsible and politically loaded question, “Did Sharpton pick the next attorney general?” That ploy quickly went by the wayside when no one could produce a shred of proof that Rev. Sharpton had had any backroom dealings with Ms. Lynch or President Obama.

Then again that wasn’t really the issue anyway. It was that Ms. Lynch was President Obama’s pick. The GOP could latch on to this in its relentless drive to tar President Obama as an imperial president who thumbs his nose at Congress at every turn and chooses partisan handmaidens to do his bidding.

The GOP had yet another reason to try and figure out a way to brush aside Ms. Lynch’s sterling credentials and make her a target. She almost certainly would carry on the fight Mr. Holder waged against voter registration discrimination through aggressive enforcement of the voting rights laws. This poses a major threat to the GOP’s push to undermine the Voting Rights Act with a rash of voter ID laws and restrictions, topped by the lawsuit before the U.S. Supreme Court to scrub the act.

This is even more important with the opening gun of the 2016 presidential elections. The GOP’s trounce of Democrats in the midterm elections ultimately would be wiped out if there is an upsurge in black and Latino voters to the polls in 2016. They made a huge difference in President Obama’s election and re-election victories, and in ensuring Democrat gains in many state elections in 2008 and 2012. The full enforcement of the Voting Rights Act is a strong safeguard that those gains could be made again in 2016. This is the last thing the GOP wants.

President Obama called the GOP’s disgraceful delay on Ms. Lynch’s confirmation, “embarrassing.” It is that and much more. Yet, President Obama is well aware that Ms. Lynch was simply a pawn in the GOP’s high-stakes game not just to embarrass him, but to hamstring his presidency in its final stretch to the end of his White House tenure.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst.