High theater was on full display during Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions’ confirmation hearing for attorney general this week. He fielded compliments on his character and knocked softball questions from his Republican colleagues out of the park. All while seeking to assure us that he is just a misunderstood southern gentlemen who loves the law, hates the Klan and only prosecuted voting rights activists to save black people from themselves.
It didn’t work in his confirmation hearing for a federal judgeship, but unfortunately, he may get away with it this time.
In his hearing testimony, he blamed everyone but the police for the nation’s policing problem. He criticized “the smearing of whole departments” while he himself reduced whole communities to erroneous crime statistics. He expressed worry over how critiques of misconduct have affected police morale, without addressing the morality of police killing unarmed women, men, and children. And he saluted the many officers who have been killed in the line of duty – again with no mention of the people who have been killed at the hands of the police.
This should be of no surprise.
Sessions has criticized the Department of Justice’s civil rights division for having an “agenda”, but his record suggests he has an agenda of his own – one in complete opposition to the historic, hard-fought, bloodstained agenda that has come to be codified in the very laws the civil rights division is specifically tasked with enforcing.
The late Coretta Scott King underscored this point 30 years ago in a newly discovered, searing indictment of Sessions’ agenda in a letter to the Senate judiciary committee that was neither made public nor entered into the congressional record by either then-Senate judiciary chair Strom Thurmond or Chuck Grassley. In it she lambasts Sessions for doing with the law what local southern sheriffs did “with clubs and cattle prods” during the civil rights movement.
The threat Sessions poses to civil rights is not just rooted in past controversy, it is evident from the positions and actions he has taken on some of the leading issues of the day.
Instead of debating whether Sessions’ comments, or even past cases, make him “a racist”, we should look at the larger systemic picture and be concerned with the harm that will result from giving a man with his views the official power to act on them.
A known opponent of policies for both legal and undocumented immigration, Sessions opposed reform bills in both the Bush and Obama administrations. In fact, Sessions argued that the term “immigration reform” needed to be “reclaim[ed]” and “reappl[ied]” to “legislation that benefits Americans”, and he openly promotes the rhetoric that immigrants take jobs and opportunities from hardworking, deserving Americans.
He presents his immigration policies as a defense of American workers, describing the 2013 immigration reform bill that he opposed as “offer[ing] nothing except lower wages, higher unemployment and a heavier tax burden” for American citizens.
When Barack Obama issued executive orders to protect so-called Dreamers and the parents of American citizens or lawful permanent residents, Sessions urged Congress to defund the orders, calling them “amnesties”.
Sessions has said that it is the job of the attorney general to check the powers of the president (and said so again on Tuesday in response to a question from Republican Senator Chuck Grassley), but the real question is who will check Sessions if he is granted the authority to carry out his anti-immigrant agenda?
Sessions’ position on national security is closely aligned with his anti-immigrant stance. He voted to undermine the prohibition on barring immigration to the US on the basis of religion and went on a tirade against the “global right to migrate” in the process.
Although he conveniently said the opposite at his hearing, Sessions supports torture, contravening both universally accepted human rights law, domestic and international. He also opposes the closing of Guantánamo Bay and the right of detainees to due process and access to American courts, despite multiple rulings upholding those rights by the US supreme court.
And what about black lives? After years of communities, activists, scholars and the government working to make issues of race and policing part of the national conversation, a Sessions attorney generalship would effectively end cooperative efforts between federal and local governments on issues of police reform and accountability.
While the Obama administration’s DoJ has investigated local police departments and interactions between the police and the communities of color, Sessions has the support of the conservative Fraternal Order of Police and other major police organizations and lamented today that “law enforcement is unfairly maligned by a few bad actors”.
The story of the nomination of Jeff Sessions is not simply one of ideology: it is about what happens to the people when their nationally appointed advocate is incapable, uninterested and unwilling to protect them.
If we’re not careful, we might soon find out.