Jesse Jackson: Civil rights at risk under Sessions

[riversedge]

http://chicago.suntimes.com/opinion/jesse-jackson-civil-rights-at-risk-under-sessions/



Opinion 01/01/2017, 04:00pm
Jesse Jackson: Civil rights at risk under Sessions


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U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., President-elect Donald Trump's pick for attorney general, cheers on the crowd during a Trump rally in Mobile, Alabama, in December. | Brynn Anderson/AP



Confirmation hearings for Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, named by Donald Trump to be attorney general of the United States, will begin on Jan. 10, before Trump is even inaugurated. The rush and insistence on only two days of hearings reflect Republican efforts to cram the nomination through before Americans understand what is at stake.

Sessions will, no doubt, present himself as a humble, genial and reasonable public servant. In reality, Sessions is an outlier, an unimaginable nominee as attorney general, an implacable opponent of the very rights and liberties that the attorney general is supposed to defend. As more than 200 civil rights, human rights and women’s groups noted in a unified statement: “Sen. Sessions has a 30-year record of racial insensitivity, bias against immigrants, disregard for the rule of law and hostility to the protection of civil rights that makes him unfit to serve as the attorney general of the United States.”



Three decades ago, a Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee rejected Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Sessions to a federal judgeship. It deemed him unfit for the bench due to his repeated racially biased remarks, his intemperate dismissal of the ACLU and the NAACP as “un-American,” and his open opposition to the Voting Rights Act, which he scorned as “intrusive.” Republicans agreed that no person with such extreme views should adjudicate the laws that he clearly disdained. That was then. Now Donald Trump and Sen. Charles “Chuck” Grassley, R-Iowa, are intent on putting Sessions in charge of enforcing those very laws.

The attorney general of the United States is a powerful position. The person who holds this office has immense discretion in how the law is enforced — which cases the office chooses to prosecute and which it does not. The attorney general heads several agencies, including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the immigration courts. Given his views and that power, there is no question that Sessions would put fundamental rights at risk as attorney general...........................

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

1. Now THERE'S an understatement!!

[Skittles]

2. gawd, he LOOKS like a klansman