A TOPIC FOR JEFF SESSIONS TO AVOID…. The irony is rich.
Republicans came out firing at this morning’s confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor, as Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, accused Sotomayor of being prejudiced.
Citing a controversial racial bias case in which a fire department discarded the results of a qualifying test when black firefighters scored too low, Sessions said Sotomayor was biased in favor of the minority employees. […]
But Sessions’s attack wasn’t confined to the Ricci v. DeStefano case. The Alabama Republican indicted Sotomayor’s entire philosophy as based on non-judicial factors.
“Call it empathy, call it prejudice, or call it sympathy, but whatever it is, it is not law. In truth it is more akin to politics. And politics has no place in the courtroom,” Sessions said.
He can go through the motions if he likes, but to hear Jeff Sessions accuse anyone of “prejudice” is pretty ridiculous.
All it does is offer a chance to revisit Sessions’ own lengthy record.
As a U.S. Attorney in Alabama, Sessions’ most notable effort was prosecuting three civil rights workers, including a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr., on trumped up charges of voter fraud.
Also during his illustrious career in Alabama, Sessions called the NAACP “un-American” because it, among other groups, “forced civil rights down the throats of people.” A former career Justice Department official who worked with Sessions recalled an instance when he referred to a white attorney as a “disgrace to his race” for litigating voting rights cases on behalf of African Americans. Sessions later acknowledged having made many of the controversial remarks attributed to him, but claimed to have been joking.
What’s more, Thomas Figures, a former assistant U.S. Attorney in Alabama and an African American, later explained that during a 1981 murder investigation involving the Ku Klux Klan, Sessions was heard by several colleagues commenting that he “used to think they [the Klan] were OK” until he found out some of them were “pot smokers.” Sessions once again acknowledged making the remark, but once again claimed to have been kidding. Figures also remembered having heard Sessions call him “boy,” and once warn him to “be careful what you say to white folks.”
