Why Jeff Sessions' Loss Is Cold Comfort
When Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was resoundingly defeated this week in his race to reclaim the Senate seat hed once held for 20 years, I wish I could say I celebrated. On the face of things, it should have been gratifying to see the end of a political career that had been defined by racism and xenophobia. Im from Alabama. Long before Sessions entered his unholy alliance with our racist president and, in short order, rose to national prominence (or, perhaps, national mockery), I was all too keenly aware of the damage this man could do. Hed been doing it all over my home state since before I was born.
Starting out a prosecutor in Mobile, a coastal town steeped in old money and Confederate nostalgia, Sessions showed an early commitment to airing white grievances and turning back the clock on civil rights by using the modern, legal tools available to him. After Reagan appointed him as a U.S. Attorney in 1981, Sessions waged the racist drug war with a firebrands passion, pushing for the maximum possible sentences and filling Alabamas prisons with black and brown bodies. By 1985, he had turned his attention to disenfranchisement, charging former Martin Luther King Jr. aide Albert Turner, Turners wife, and another civil rights activist a group that became known as the Marion Three with voter fraud after they had raised voter turnout in several rural Alabama counties by educating elderly black people and those who couldnt afford to take a day off work to vote on how to cast their ballot absentee. (Its worth noting that Turner had helped organize the civil rights march from Selma, Sessions birthplace, to Montgomery.) All three defendants were acquitted.
Nevertheless, such comportment on Sessions part didnt stop Reagan from nominating him for a federal judgeship in 1986 though it did keep him from getting the position. During his confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, a black assistant U.S. attorney testified that Sessions had called him boy and had once opined that he thought the Ku Klux Klan was OK until I found out they smoked pot (Sessions denied the former and professed that the latter was only a joke). Witnesses questioned his commitment to cases involving civil rights violations and said he referred to the NAACP and UCLA as un-American. Coretta Scott King sent a nine-page letter to the committee, writing that Mr. Sessions has used the awesome powers of his office in a shabby attempt to intimidate and frighten elderly black voters. For this reprehensible conduct he should not be rewarded with a federal judgeship. He became the first federal district court nominee in more than 30 years to be denied confirmation. His own Alabama Senator, Democrat Howell Heflin, cast the deciding vote against him.
By the time Sessions joined the Senate in 1997, gleefully taking Heflins seat, the Republican Party was shifting increasingly to the right. Sessions casual racism the chummy nonchalance with which he assumed his own superiority may not have been what got him elected, but it didnt keep him from it, either. Voting against immigration reform, criminal justice reform, the Affordable Care Act, marriage equality, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, and the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, he was known as one of the most conservative members of Congress. But in Alabama, he was seen as one of our own, someone who upheld the staunchly conservative ideals of the majority of the states white voters. The right-wing populism that could have been viewed as gauche by the monied Republican establishment in Montgomery and Birmingham when Sessions started his career, was increasingly becoming the politics of the day. Sessions won his 1996 race for Senate with 52 percent of the vote. He won his 2014 race, unopposed, with 97 percent of it. When I visited D.C. as part of a high school mock Congress, I remember my nascent feminist ire being raised by the barely-there skirts and the chauvinist air in the offices of some of my Alabama representatives. By contrast, I remember Sessions as kind and avuncular. At a time when I was much younger and more directly a product of my cultural heritage, as Sessions would have it, its not inconceivable that I would have even cast a ballot for him.
-more-
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/jeff-sessions-alabama-senate-loss-1030317/
bronxiteforever
(9,287 posts)OnDoutside
(19,908 posts)the ignorant racist. They're still racist.