Attorney General Who Opposes Civil Rights

As head of the Department of Justice the Attorney General is responsible for ensuring justice for all citizens. Trump nominee Jeff Sessions has a history of racially hostile remarks, and positions on women's rights, LBGT rights, capital punishment, and presidential authority that have been opposed by the ACLU and other civil rights organizations.

During the Reagan administration, the Senate rejected Sessions for a federal judgeship for making racist statements and falsely prosecuting black political activists in Alabama. In 1985 Sessions, then US Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, charged voting rights activist Albert Turner and his wife with mail fraud, altering absentee ballots, and conspiring to vote more than once. Turner's indictment was based largely on his having mailed a number of absentee ballots on behalf of elderly black voters. Jurors in the the trial, held ironically in Selma, AL, scene of the 1954 civil rights march, deliberated less than three hours before returning not-guilty verdicts on all counts.

When the Reagan administration surprisingly nominated Sessions for a federal judgeship four months later, civil rights advocates were surprised, to say the least. As Ted Kennedy remarked at the time, "Mr. Sessions’ role in the voting fraud case in Alabama alone should bar him from sitting on the bench." Attorneys from the Reagan Justice Department's Civil Rights Division broke with tradition to testify against him at his congressional hearings. Attorney Gerry Herbert told Congress that Sessions had characterized the NAACP and ACLU as "Communist inspired" and "un-American." A black assistant US attorney from Mobile testified that Sessions had repeatedly referred to him as "boy," and that he thought the KKK was ok until he learned they smoked pot. Sessions himself admitted that he had called the Voting Rights Act "a piece of intrusive legislation." Sessions was the first Reagan judicial nominee rejected by the Senate, with Alabama Senator Howell Heflin casting the deciding vote.

In January 2015 Sessions authored the "Immigration Handbook for the New Republican Majority", which blames job loss on immigration and calls for a slowdown. (There is broad consensus that, while some workers may be harmed by an influx of immigrant labor, the overall impact on the economy and jobs is positive.)

Claiming that "we're seeing more and more" Muslims enter the US and that "a lot of them have done terrorist acts," Sessions praised Trump's call for a ban on Muslim immigration as "appropriate," and having "caused us think about it a lot more concretely."

Sessions voted against the Violence Against Women Act, against banning the CIA from using torture, and against the USA Freedom Act. He voted to defund Planned Parenthood and has called for the Justice Department that he will now head to investigate the group.