By Dustin Rowles | Politics | January 4, 2017 |
By Dustin Rowles | Politics | January 4, 2017 |
Democrats preparing for confirmation hearings have their sights set on 8 Trump cabinet appointments, but the two they are laser focused on are the Secretary of State nominee, Rex Tillerson and Alabama Senator, Jeff Sessions, who has been nominated to be Attorney General of the United States.
Donald Trump could not have picked a worse person for the role. The fact that he’s a Senator in the most racist state in the nation should already be a red flag, but Sessions was also dinged by the Senate under the Reagan administration for a lesser position — a seat on the federal bench — for racist comments after it was revealed that he called the NAACP and the ACLU “un-American” and “Communist-inspired” because they “forced civil rights down the throats of people.” He once also said he was fine with the KKK but for the fact that they smoked pot.
But let’s put aside, briefly, the fact that Jeff Sessions is a racist fuckpig, because Donny Trash doesn’t care about racists, and neither does much of the GOP Senate. Let’s also focus on what makes him a terrible choice for AG.
For instance, he’s dead set against the legalization of marijuana, and while states have been legalizing it across the country, the feds — under the Obama administration — have looked the other way. Sessions could theoretically render all of those state legalization laws moot. Sessions wants to reignite the war on drugs.
Sessions also doesn’t give a damn about your privacy, and introduced a bill last year to try and compel companies like Google and Microsoft to give up the goods on your data without a warrant. He’s also opposed to shield laws that protect journalists from revealing their sources (which makes him a perfect choice for Trump’s twitter feed) and he’s against federal whistleblowing laws, because no bully wants to be told on.
But it is his opposition to Civil Rights laws that’s most concerning. He’s a big proponent of voter ID laws. He doesn’t give a shit about voter intimidation, as long as it’s white people intimidating black voters. However, he did once haul three civil-rights activists into court and charged them with voter fraud for attempting to aid an elderly Black person vote. Moreover, he doesn’t feel it’s the federal government’s place to look over the shoulder of local police departments when it comes to police violence. It’s an “end run around the democratic process,” he says, which is to say: If local jurisdictions want to elect and hire racist law enforcement officials, the federal government should stay out of it.
That’s fucked up.
Not for noting, but he’s also a big, big fan of Breitbart, as you might expect.
Sessions is so bad that 1,140 nationwide law professors have signed a letter opposing his appointment.
“Nothing in Senator Sessions’ public life since 1986 has convinced us that he is a different man than the 39-year-old attorney who was deemed too racially insensitive to be a federal district court judge.”As law faculty who work every day to better understand the law and teach it to our students, we are convinced that Jeff Sessions will not fairly enforce our nation’s laws and promote justice and equality in the United States. We urge you to reject his nomination.”
Nevertheless, Sessions is attempting to position himself as a defender of Civil Rights to the Senate Judiciary committee (ha!), by suggesting that he had a hand in four Civil Rights cases, but as the Washington Post points out, he had nothing to do with those cases beyond adding his signature to a complaint, as required by his position.
It’s for these reasons that several Civil Rights activists backed by the NAACP staged a sit-in at Sessions’ office to protest his nomination as AG. How’d that go for them?
Six were arrested.
After the @jeffsessions sit-in, these mugshots aren't pretty but they're pictures of @NAACP determination. #RestoreTheVRA & #stopsessions pic.twitter.com/QWnReXQnLn
— Cornell Wm. Brooks (@CornellWBrooks) January 4, 2017
They were charged with criminal trespassing.
Sessions is expected to ultimately be confirmed, unless we manage to raise some more hell, engage in more civil disobedience, and generally disrupt the confirmation process so much that Trump finally decides it’s not worth it.