Sotomayor hearings: Sen. Jeff Sessions' personal connection to the process

Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama has given his opening statement.

Sessions is the committee’s ranking Republican, ever since Arlen Specter switched his affiliation to Democrat.

Sessions has an interesting personal connection to this process.

He came before this committee 22 years ago, when he was nominated by President Reagan to be a U.S. district judge. The committee killed the nomination on a 9-9 vote, in part because some critics of Sessions testified that he had demonstrated “gross insensitivity” on racial issues. A U.S. attorney had testified that he had heard Sessions claim that he had once admired the Ku Klux Klan.

--Kate Linthicum

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Photo: Sen. Sessions makes his opening statement.  Credit: Mario Tama / Getty Images

Comments

[ElizaDoolittle84]

As I was driving to work this morning I heard the clip's from Session's appearance on one of the Sunday morning shows. As a former resident of Alabama, I detected a note of the kind of ignorance that gives this accent a bad name, and I was inspired to look him up on Google.

I found information that lead me to write a letter to his office suggesting that the primary responsibility of his press secretary is to keep him off the airwaves. Here's what I found in the Wikipedia post:

In 1986, Sessions was nominated for a federal judgeship by Reagan. The nomination was killed by the Senate Judiciary Committee, which refused by a 9-9 vote[3] to let the nomination come to the Senate floor for a vote. Sessions's opponents accused him of "gross insensitivity” on racial issues.[2][4] Sessions allegedly made a variety of comments that opponents pointed to, when he jokingly said that the Ku Klux Klan was not so bad until he found out that some of them smoked marijuana.[2][4] Sessions also allegedly referred to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as "un-American" and "Communist-inspired" because they "forced civil rights down the throats of people." At his confirmation hearings, Sessions said that the groups could be un-American when "they involve themselves in un-American positions" in foreign policy.[4][4] Sessions claimed that the remarks had been made in jest.[2][4] One of those voting against him was Democratic Senator Howell Heflin of Alabama.

Sessions was quoted then as saying that the Senate on occasion had been insensitive to the rights and reputation of nominees.[3] After joining the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sessions remarked that his presence there, alongside several of the members who voted against him, was a “great irony.”[3] To add to the irony, after Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania left the GOP to join the Democratic Party on April 28, 2009, Sessions was assigned to be the Ranking Member on the Senate Judiciary Committee. This means that if Republicans were able to regain control of the U.S. Senate while he was still serving that he would be the chairman of the very committee that shot him down.

[B.Rodgers]

Sessions is a racist pig...point blank...and he's now in the spotlight.
That's called karma.

[mugsy4m]

Sessions cannot be as ignorant as he appears...it must be an act...how in the world can this guy be denied under Reagan???

[jummy]

i don't know how people get away with this.

sotomayer repeatedly reiterated the same theme over and over again with earnestness and conviction: latino's are more equal under the law than other groups and she proudly pollutes her rulings with a deference to her personal racialist identity. she is an avowed racist.

jeff sessions is then said to be a hypocrite for pointing this out because ... of some statements a democrat accused him of making and which he denies having made.

and then the author of this blog tells a bald-faced lie about something he did say. sessions never claimed to admire the kkk. he made what was clearly a joke about the kkk being a bunch of pot-smoking degenerates.

calumny, smears, lies, and ritualistic defamation are the only tools progressives enter the public sphere with.

for the sake of completeness, some of what sessions is accused of saying would be in no way racist. the aclu is an organization founded by moscow-loyal communists. it's a historical fact. in a just and reasonable world that would be considered every bit as damning and discrediting of that organization as it would be if it were derived of nazi-symps.

but then the royal family of the progressive democrat cesspool, the kennedies, were nazi-symps, avowed anti-semites, and the party itself was (and is, in many ways) the political seat of segregation and the kkk, so progressives can't be counted on to be honest about these things.