What we still need to know about Jeff Sessions' Justice Department
By Paul Waldman January 10 at 1:49 PM
Jeff Sessions is having his confirmation hearing to be the next attorney general of the United States today, and despite an interesting moment here or there — one senator brought up Big Papi — if you were hoping to get a true picture of how the Justice Department will change under Attorney General Sessions, you would have been disappointed.
Unfortunately, most of those changes will happen with little public notice, but we’re in for a radical shift in the way some key federal laws are enforced.
The structure of a confirmation hearing isn’t exactly set up to encourage deep, insightful probing. Each senator gets only a few minutes to ask questions, and the nominee has inevitably been coached to be as bland and noncommittal as possible, avoiding saying anything controversial. “I look forward to working with you on that, senator” is the go-to response for any tough question.
But there’s another problem, one that we saw on display today. Democrats seemed to believe that if they got the nominee to squirm about some former statement or vote, or got him on record expressing his willingness to enforce or uphold a law or decision that Republicans don’t like, then that will make some kind of difference. What we saw in the hearing was similar to what we’ve seen in public discussion about Sessions: too much attention to what he’s said and done in the past, and not enough on what he might actually do in the future.
Sessions didn’t have that much trouble rebuffing that attention today. When pressed on various charges that he is backwards on civil rights, Sessions pushed back hard. He denied that he ever harbored sympathies towards the Ku Klux Klan, and denied that he had ever made racist remarks, an issue that led to him being rejected for a federal judgeship in 1986.
more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/01/10/what-we-still-need-to-know-about-jeff-sessions-justice-department/?utm_term=.11ac56e7a6b8&wpisrc=nl_popns&wpmm=1
