Friday, November 18, 2016

Let's head off at the pass any crud about Jeff Sessions being some kind of bigot

I cede the floor to Mark Hemingway at The Weekly Standard:

Now that Jeff Sessions is Donald Trump's pick for attorney general, you're going to hear a lot of people dig up old accusations that Sessions is a racist. In fact, CNN did so last night. However, between the nature of the accusations and Sessions's actual record of desegregating schools and taking on the Klan in Alabama, it strains credulity to believe that he is a racist.
These accusations all center around the bruising judicial nomination process Sessions went through in 1986. Ronald Reagan had tapped Sessions to serve on the federal bench and the Senate judiciary committee ultimately rejected him after they heard testimony that he had supposedly called the ACLU and NAACP "un-American" and "communist-inspired," as well as made racist remarks. The accusations came from Thomas Figures, a black assistant U.S. attorney who worked for Sessions who said Sessions called him "boy" and had made a joke about how he thought the KKK was "O.K. until [he] found out they smoked pot." Another prosecutor, J. Gerald Hebert, said Sessions had called a white lawyer "a disgrace to his race" for representing black clients.
There is no concrete reason to doubt Figures or Herbert. Sessions vehemently denied calling Figures "boy," but he didn't rebut the substance of some of the claims—though he asserted they were taken out of context. It's not exactly inaccurate to point out that the NAACP and ACLU were "communist-inspired." He said thought it absurd to think he would make a pro-KKK joke considering he was prosecuting the Klan at the time he made the remark. And for what it's worth, Figures also directed accusations at a another assistant U.S. Attorney who worked with Figures. That assistant U.S. Attorney also said Figures wasn't telling the truth and defended Sessions's integrity. Ultimately, the charges were no more than hearsay.
However, it's worth noting that Senator Ted Kennedy, on the Senate judiciary committee at the time, seemed heavily invested in tanking Sessions nomination. The next year, Kennedy's crusade was to sink Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court, which has generally been regarded as a shameful smear campaign ever since. The episode upended the comity that had previously existed between the Senate and the White House on Supreme Court nominations—Antonin Scalia was approved to the court 98-0 the year before, the same year that Sessions was filleted by Kennedy and Democrats on the judiciary committee. Perhaps Sessions was a trial run for "Borking."

In 2009, Sessions himself told me that "When I got to Washington, there had been an orchestrated campaign to smear my record, and it was executed with great care. And I, frankly, was a babe in the woods and wasn't sufficiently prepared for it." For that reason, when Sessions got to the Senate he has always been more deferential toward nominations than most of his GOP colleagues. For instance, he was one of the only Republican senators to support Eric Holder's nomination for attorney general.

Sessions's actual track record certainly doesn't suggest he's a racist. Quite the opposite, in fact. As a U.S. Attorney he filed several cases to desegregate schools in Alabama. And he also prosecuted the head of the state Klan, Henry Francis Hays, for abducting and killing Michael Donald, a black teenager selected at random. Sessions insisted on the death penalty for Hays. When he was later elected the state Attorney General, Sessions followed through and made sure Hays was executed. The successful prosecution of Hays also led to a $7 million civil judgment against the Klan, effectively breaking the back of the KKK in Alabama.

As a U.S. attorney, he also prosecuted a group of civil rights activists, which included a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr., for voter fraud in Perry County, Alabama. The case fell apart, and Sessions bluntly told me he "failed to make the case." This incident has also been used to claim that Sessions is racist—but it shouldn't be. The county has been dogged with accusations of voter fraud for decades. In 2008, state and federal officials investigated voter fraud in Perry County after "a local citizens group gathered affidavits detailing several cases in which at least one Democratic county official paid citizens for their votes, or encouraged them to vote multiple times." A detailed story in the Tuscaloosa News reported that voting patterns in one Perry County town were also mighty suspicious in 2012: "Uniontown has a population of 1,775, according to the 2010 census but, according to the Perry County board of registrars, has 2,587 registered voters. The total votes cast thereTuesday—1,431—represented a turnout of 55 percent of the number of registered voters and a whopping 80.6 percent of the town's population."
I don't usually excerpt essentially the totality of articles I want my readers to check out, but I am already smelling the stench of Leftist accusations, and it's important to be preemptive.

Actually, it's always important to be preemptive. 
 

13 comments:

  1. Nope, he's just a lying sack http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?504318-Sessions-quot-Good-people-don-t-smoke-marijuana

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  2. We didn't get the message Jeffie Joe, you GD hill jack!

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  3. My bad, you're just a plain idiot Jefferson Beauregard "Jeff" Sessions III

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  4. Oh, please. Let's not get mired in trivial peripheral issues when we're talking about who is going to head up the Justice Department.

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  5. Sure, I am serious. We'll see how serious you get if say someone came along and said something like good people don't drink alcohol. Good people beat their wives, kill people with their cars, engage in angry outbursts and fights, have unprotected sex with people not their spouses, that kind of kindness. He is either a power mongering liar or just old and real dumb. He's 50 years behind the times. I don't think it is really a trivial peripheral issue when you look at the votes in the 6 states that passed it this time. We don't need no granddaddy. We got the wicked stepfather as president elect already. Take booze away from the populace and you'll see what a trivial issue chemical relaxants are. I can tell this guy Jefferson is no Thomas. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, my oh my, come and get us!

    At a Senate drug hearing in April of this year, Sessions said that “we need grown-ups in charge in Washington to say marijuana is not the kind of thing that ought to be legalized, it ought not to be minimized, that it's in fact a very real danger.” He voiced concern over statistics showing more drivers were testing positive for THC, the active component in marijuana, in certain states.

    Sessions further argued that a lack of leadership from President Barack Obama had been one of the drivers of the trend toward marijuana legalization in recent years. “I think one of [Obama's] great failures, it's obvious to me, is his lax treatment in comments on marijuana,” Sessions said at the hearing. “It reverses 20 years almost of hostility to drugs that began really when Nancy Reagan started 'Just Say No.'”

    He added that lawmakers and leaders in government needed to foster “knowledge that this drug is dangerous, you cannot play with it, it is not funny, it's not something to laugh about . . . and to send that message with clarity that good people don't smoke marijuana.”


    http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump%e2%80%99s-pick-for-attorney-general-%e2%80%98good-people-don%e2%80%99t-smoke-marijuana%e2%80%99/ar-AAktrCb?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=SL5JDHP

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  6. Did anyone ever clue Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III on the settled scientific fact that a few puffs of THC stays in the fatty tissue for up to 30 days after ingestion? Ya think that might have something to do with drivers in wrecks testing positive? I am certain his views on other consensual "crime" mirror that of every other legal despot we've seen come down the pike over the past 50 years. That's OK, civil disobedience will go on.....

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  7. You're gonna see jackboots and they are wearing suits and are lawyers but not at all in love.

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  8. He's no racist, just a fun and funny guy: Sessions' anti-pot positions have been consistent throughout his career. As far back as 1986, he joked that he thought the Ku Klux Klan “was okay until I found out they smoked pot,” according to the New York Times.

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  9. Perhaps you can tell that I'm really not too interested in his views on marijuana.

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  10. We know. It's OK. Go your own way. That's what it's all about. Try to be good now, OK

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  11. I've been through all this big brother and big daddy government crap before. I'm still gonna blow a doob on my deathbed, unless a steady supply of nitrous oxide is available. Did you know that that stuff's legal?

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  12. Even moments after brain surgery Rodney Dangerfield didn’t miss a beat. Rodney’s doctor came to his bedside after he was taken off the respirator. He said, “Rodney, are you coughing up much?” And Rodney said, “Last week, five hundred for a hooker.” Rodney died at 4:20 EST.

    http://www.tokeofthetown.com/2012/02/worth_repeating_like_dangerfield_marijuana_doesnt.php/

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  13. Here we are Jefferson Beauregard Sessions IV, come and get us, but you better hurry cause we're blowing fast....

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