3rd LD Writethru: Loretta Lynch confirmed as U.S. Attorney General in Senate vote

Five months after she was nominated by U.S. President Barack Obama to serve as the country's Attorney General, Loretta Lynch got a confirmation vote in the Senate of Congress on Thursday.

The vote was 56-43. Lynch is replacing Attorney General Eric Holder, who has served in the job since Obama took office in 2009. She is the first African-American woman to hold the position.

After Obama nominated Lynch on November 8 last year, a confirmation vote was held up in part because Republicans insisted on first resolving a dispute with Democrats over an unrelated bill.

The wait is one of the nation's most protracted cabinet-level confirmation delays, marked by partisan fights and Republican arguments that she won't be independent enough from the President.

Republicans have found themselves in a quandary. They longed to replace Holder, and they agreed that Lynch was qualified for the job. But they opposed her because Lynch defended President Obama's executive actions on immigration.

What's more, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and majority leader, had held up the nomination until the Senate voted on a human trafficking bill, a process that dragged on for weeks.

In the end, several Republicans, including McConnell, surprised many of their own colleagues and voted aye for Lynch.

When Lynch was nominated as Attorney General last November, Obama deferred deportation for three years for about 5 million undocumented immigrants, who came to the U.S. as children, and parents of children who are citizens or legal permanent residents. He issued the orders after years of inaction by Congress on immigration.

At her confirmation hearing on Jan. 28, Lynch said that the legal underpinnings of the policy were sound. Focusing immigration enforcement and deportation on dangerous and violent criminals was "a reasonable way to marshal limited resources to deal with the problem," she said.

According to the U.S. Congressional Research Service, Lynch's confirmation took longer than that for all but two other nominees for the position: Edwin Meese III, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan, and Mitchell Palmer, who was picked by President Woodrow Wilson.

Lynch was a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York for nine years before becoming chief prosecutor in 1999. She left the office in 2001 to enter private practice and returned to the U.S. attorney's post in 2010. Her district covers Brooklyn, Staten Island, Queens and Long Island.

As U.S. attorney, Lynch has a reputation for being tough on terrorism, cybercrime and public corruption. As co-chairwoman of the Attorney General's Advisory Committee, she has deep knowledge of how the Justice Department operates. Endite