ALABAMA´S SENATOR SESSIONS: A THROWBACK TO RACISTS PAST

Senator Sessions was born in the wrong century. He truly belongs back in the days well before Abraham Lincoln.

... Alabama's Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is the junior United States Senator from Alabama. He is also a southern racist.

Sessions is a member of the Republican Party, and is the new ranking minority member on the Senate Judiciary Committee. The senator was not named after America´s President Thomas Jefferson, but instead after Jefferson Davis, the long deceased President of the failed Confederate States of America.

This Tuesday morning, Senator "Jeff" Sessions promised a "respectful tone" and "maybe some disagreements" when lawmakers began questioning Judge Sonia Sotomayor for her nomination to the US Supreme Court.

However, immediately after making this very courteous and appropriate comment, Senator Sessions proceeded to say;

"I will not vote for, and no senator should vote for an individual nominated by any president who believes it is acceptable for a judge to allow their own personal background, gender, prejudices or sympathies to sway their decision."

He further stated; "Call it empathy, call it prejudice or call it sympathy, but whatever it is, it's not law. In truth, it's more akin to politics, and politics has no place in the courtroom."

This was of course stated in regards to the president´s stated desire for a Supreme Court Justice with "empathy" and to the judge´s 8 year old remark to a room full of young Latinas that she would hope that a wise Latina woman would make a better decision than the average "white male judge" that had not lived such a diverse life.

She has now repeated a number of times that her comment was made in trying to inspire the young Latina lawyers in the meeting that they could be whatever they chose, if they applied themselves and continued to work hard at it.

But for Senator Sessions to make his remarks goes far beyond the pale, when one considers comments from his own past history.

This is the individual that in 1986 was nominated by President Ronald Reagan for a federal judgeship. During his nomination it was brought to light that Mr. Sessions had previously said that he thought that the Ku Klux Klan was "not so bad of a group until I found out that some of them had smoked marijuana".

This is the man who called white civil right lawyers "race traitors", and this is the man who referred to a prominent local black lawyer as "boy".

Senator Sessions also had referred to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as "un-American" and "Communist-inspired" because they "forced civil rights down the throats of people". He also said that these groups were un-American when "they involve themselves in un-American positions in foreign policy". (i.e: You´re un-American if you disagree with the government positions.)

Needless to say, his nomination was immediately killed by the Senate Judiciary Committee which refused to even let it advance to the full Senate floor for a vote. One of those voting against him was his own Senator Howell Heflin of his home state of Alabama.

After being removed for consideration, Sessions has been quoted as saying that on occasion, the Senate has been "insensitive to the rights and reputation of its nominees". After he later became the Senator of Alabama and had joined the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sessions remarked that his presence there, alongside several of the members who voted against him, was a "great irony."

To add to the irony, after Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania left the GOP to join the Democratic Party this April, Sessions was assigned to be the Ranking Minority Member on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

This means that if the Republicans are ever able to regain control of the US Senate while he is still serving on the committee. Sessions will then become the chairman of the very committee that shot him down. (Now, that´s really frightening!)

In Sessions previous life, he had also unsuccessfully prosecuted three black civil rights workers, including a former aide to Martin Luther King, Jr., on a case of election fraud for the 1984 election. Sessions had spent hours interrogating African American voters in predominantly black counties, finding only 14 "allegedly" tampered ballots out of approximately 1.7 million ballots cast. The three civil rights workers were acquitted after only four hours of jury deliberation.

Senator Sessions was also one of only nine opponents of Senator John McCain´s anti-torture amendment. Sessions still supports former Vice President Dick Cheney's proposal to exempt the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from any ban on the use of torture.

Sessions has been opposed to parts of the Voting Rights Act, which he described as a "piece of intrusive legislation." In 2006, he was in favor of letting it expire, and he also said that Congress should consider if it was even needed in some Northern cities and states. He later voted in favor of extending it.

Sessions has advocated the extension of FISA legislation to legalize the Bush Administration's wiretapping techniques. He compared worries about government overreach to "two dramatic errors some years ago in a situation just like this, on emotion driven by our civil libertarian friends".

Sessions was criticized for this phrasing by Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer of California who replied, "[Senator Sessions said] 'The civil libertarians among us' — and then he listed all the bad things he thinks the civil libertarians among us have done. I hope every one of us — every one of us in this Chamber — supports the civil liberties of the United States of America because if you don't, you don't believe in the Constitution."

Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is the perfect example of what was wrong with the southern slave states, the idea and concept of the American Confederacy and now today, all that was wrong with the previous Bush / Cheney Administration.

One can only hope that the residents of Alabama have begun to really understand and to know what kind of person Senator Sessions is and that they will get rid of him in his next election.

But once again I´m not holding my breath.

Copyright G.Ater 2009

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