Jeff Sessions: A Racist, Cannabis-phobic Choice for Attorney General

Typical effects of alcohol and drug abuse on White Americans

Alabama Republican Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was nominated to a federal judgeship by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. Sessions was at that time U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, and he was 39 years old.  A year before that, he had attempted to prosecute three black civil rights workers for alleged voter fraud.  The three were quickly acquitted.  The case was unusual in that it appeared to be a reaction to the increase in black voters among Alabama’s electorate, in response to voter registration drives.  Sessions apparently spent hours interrogating black absentee voters and eventually located fourteen allegedly tampered ballots out of 1.7 million cast.  Civil rights groups claimed that Sessions was looking in the wrong place for voter fraud.  (New Republic article from 2002.)

During the confirmation hearings, Sessions admitted that he considered the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) “un-American.”  In addition, he admitted to calling President Johnson’s signature civil rights legislation, the Voting Rights Act of 1965,  a “piece of intrusive legislation.”   He admitted to calling a white lawyer “a disgrace to his race” for pursuing civil rights cases.  Finally, he admitted to saying during a murder investigation involving the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) that he “used to think they [the Klan] were OK” until he discovered that some of them were “pot smokers.”  He claimed that the remark was clearly made in jest (Perhaps so, but who was he making fun of?)

Another lawyer who worked for the Attorney General’s office, a black man named Thomas Figures, said that Sessions had called the National Council of Churches and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference “un-American.”  He corroborated the “pot smokers” remark and said that Sessions had told him to “be careful what you say to white folks” after Sessions heard him “chastising” a white secretary.

That nomination failed over allegations that Sessions had made racist remarks, among other peccadilloes.  Sessions was still popular in Alabama, and he was elected Attorney General for the state in 1994.  He continued to investigate alleged voter fraud in absentee ballots among the black community, and he was accused of not investigating the burnings of black churches that swept the state the year he became Attorney General.  In 1996, Senator Heflin retired and Sessions was elected to his former seat in the US Senate, where he remains.  At age 69, he is still the junior Senator from Alabama.

Senator Sessions also received a seat on the Judiciary Committee, the same committee that rejected him in 1996.  He has supported many notoriously racist nominees since then, including Charles Pickering, who wrote a paper defending Mississippi’s law against race-mixing in marriage (miscegenation) in 1959, before it was nullified by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional.  Sessions actually described Pickering as “a leader for racial harmony.”  (All of the above quotes are from the New Republic article.)

In 2009, President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.  That nomination succeeded, but during her confirmation hearings, Senator Sessions spent 30 minutes grilling her on allegedly racist remarks she had made; you can view his questioning here.  (Thanks to Mother Jones for the link; you can read their analysis of the questioning session here.  For completeness, here is Sen. Lindsay Graham’s questioning, and here is Sen. John Kyl’s turn.)

Donald’s transition team put out a press release that listed several people and groups who supported Sessions’ bid for attorney general.  The groups were described as “civil rights and law enforcement groups” but none of the groups or people listed actually worked to support enhancing civil rights; those whose work could be described as being in the civil rights field were actively opposed to civil rights for immigrants or people of color.  In fact, actual civil rights groups are broadly and vehemently opposed to Sessions’ nomination.

I could go on, but I think  Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III’s record speaks for itself.  The photograph at top illustrates the strenuous efforts that US Attorney General Sessions will exert to protect our white womanhood from the pernicious effects of that Negro devil Marijuana.