"You will get a fair hearing before this committee,"
I'll believe that when I see it. It's already been made clear that Sessions will do whatever it takes to advance the Republican agenda regardless of its negative effect on this nation. I have no doubt he'll try something to derail her nomination.
President Reagan nominated Sessions to be a federal judge, but the Senate Judiciary Committee rejected him 23 years ago this week.
Which, as you'll see, was the right decision.
"It was not a pleasant event, I got to tell you. It was really so heartbreaking to me," Sessions said.
It was such an injustice that they didn't confirm another racist to the federal bench.
His nomination to be a U.S. District Court judge was troubled from the start because of controversy surrounding his prosecution of civil rights activists for voting fraud.
How dare they question why he tried to throw civil rights activists in jail for registering blacks to vote? That was a common tactic among the racist governments of the south during the civil rights era.
Sessions' fate was sealed after Democrats called several witnesses who accused him of a pattern of racial insensitivity -- including calling a black lawyer "boy" and civil rights groups such as the NAACP "un-American."
That's not hard to believe. These are pretty good reasons not to confirm someone to a position of power. Evidently the people of Alabama don't care about this kind of record. Hell, they might consider it a plus.
"That was not fair. That was not accurate. Those were false charges and distortions of anything that I did, and it really was not. I never had those kinds of views, and I was caricatured in a way that was not me," Sessions said.
Nobody ever admits to doing these things. Even people who think they are correct to do such things know in their hearts that it's wrong and they should not admit to it.
The parallel to today, with conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh labeling Sotomayor a racist, is eerie.
No, it isn't. It's not even close. Trying to draw a parallel between the honest concern about Sessions record and the completely baseless and political charges against Sotomayor is borderline racist in itself. The charges coming from the likes of Limbaugh and Gingrich are being leveled for purely political reasons. The Senate had an obligation to investigate the charges against Sessions and came to the right conclusion when they found out the charges were credible.
She ruled for some cases that might be called affirmative action in which one group may have prevailed over another group and I think that raises questions.
Affirmative Action is not racism. It's certainly not comparable to the aggressive, and sometimes murderous, tactics used by law enforcement and government officials against civil rights activists.
Because he is the lead Republican on the committee holding Sotomayor's confirmation hearings, Sessions will have a big role in setting the tone of the opposition.
It is quite ironic that someone who was denied a position on the federal bench for acts of racism would now be in a position to derail someone else's nomination for the federal bench for racist reasons. I mean really, aren't there enough white Catholic males on the bench for them? Is one minority woman really too much for them?
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