Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama is leading the Republican charge against the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. To hear him and other Republicans tell it, Sotomayor is a racist and practically an anarchist who will single-handedly destroy the American justice system; in actuality, she’s been a very respected, center-left judge who has often disappointed the liberals she is supposedly leading in her march toward some kind of communist judicial revolution.
What hasn’t received nearly enough attention, however, is Sessions’ own history. Sotomayor may not be a racist, but Sessions certainly seems to be. Sessions was nominated for a federal judgeship in the 1980s by Pres. Reagan, but he was rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee for “a pattern of racial insensitivity.” And that was putting it mildly. During testimony at Sessions’ hearing, it was revealed that he believed the NAACP was “Communist-inspired” and had "forced civil rights down the throats of people." Other choice Sessions quotes include the time he said he “used to think they [the Klan] were OK until I found out some of them were pot smokers”; and he called a white civil rights lawyer “a disgrace to his race.” In the past decade, Sessions has become known as the Senate’s most staunch advocate for restricting Latino immigration to the U.S., which political insiders have said makes him an odd choice – and a particularly dangerous one for the GOP – to head the opposition to Sotomayor. Sessions’ past statements may be water under the bridge, but they’re real nonetheless. It would pay to keep this man’s own racist past in mind this week as he tries to tear down the character of someone who happens to disagree with him politically.
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