American civil rights campaigner, and widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King (1927-2006) stands behind a podium at Peace-In-Vietnam Rally in Central Park on April 27, 1968. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Update 2/9: More than 100 people showed up on just a few hours notice. After chanting and marching up and down the block, they left copies of the letter and signs on McConnell’s doorstep. More here.

Original:

As the news keeps pouring out of the Donald Trump administration, Ruth Eisenberg deleted Twitter.

“There are so many outrages every day with this administration that one is in a constant state of outrage,” says Eisenberg. “I want to be able to live my life, and choose my outrages. I don’t want to be outraged constantly.”

But when she came home from a meeting last night, turned on the TV, and saw what happened on the Senate floor, Eisenberg swelled with anger. “The combination of the sexism of silencing one of the few female senators, and the fact that she was reading Coretta Scott King’s words, outraged me.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) invoked a rarely used rule to silence Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) as she read aloud from a letter that King wrote in opposition to Jeff Sessions’ nomination for a federal judgeship.

“Senator Warren was giving a lengthy speech,” McConnell said. “She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”

Tonight, Eisenberg and a small group of friends will take up the mantle and read King’s speech on C Street NE, right outside McConnell’s home.

“We felt he should have listened to it last night on the Senate floor, and since he wouldn’t listen to it last night, we will read it to him tonight,” says Eisenberg, a lawyer in her 60s whose practice represents non-profits. Though she’s participated in protests before, including the Women’s March and another recent rally, this is the first time Eisenberg is helping lead the charge.

It started with another friend’s comment on Facebook, saying women should read King’s letter to McConnell at his own abode. The conversation grew from there.

Eisenberg asked if anyone knew where the Senate majority leader lives. Somebody did. She asked if anyone had a bullhorn. Someone else had one.

“We’re just regular D.C. people—parents, grandparents, regular citizens of the District of Columbia and Maryland,” she says, adding that some are longtime activists and others have been more recently “activated by the president’s policies and his general unfitness for office.” They aren’t planning any acts of civil disobedience outside McConnell’s home and expect a small crowd.

“This protest is being led by women, but men and women oppose Jeff Sessions for attorney general and oppose the sexism of not allowing Senator Warren to speak,” Eisenberg says.

McConnell invoked a Senate rule that prohibits any senator from “directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another senator or to other senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a senator.” Warren countered that she was merely quoting the views of others, and pointed out that Sessions was not even a senator when the observations were made.

“[Warren] was reading a letter from Coretta Scott King, the wife of Martin Luther King Jr., she was not trashing [Sessions],” Eisenberg says. “She was reading a letter written in 1986 that talked about things that I believe are factual about how Jeff Sessions used his power as the United States attorney to try to stop black people from voting.”

Other Democratic senators, notably all men, were able to read from King’s letter on the Senate floor without censure this morning. (Update: Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) also used King’s words on the Senate floor.)

Without a senator to call, the group is responding with one of Washingtonians only weapons: proximity. Local marijuana activists have similarly kept up the pressure by staging a series of demonstrations around the Capitol and making their presence known at all of Sessions’ confirmation hearings.

“The people are making our voices heard. We don’t have a vote, but we have voice,” Eisenberg says. “And we don’t want Jeff Sessions to be the attorney general. He is singularly unfit.”

More information about the protest is available here. Here is the full text of King’s 1986 letter against Sessions.

Scott King 1986 Letter and Testimony Signed by johnd7463 on Scribd