Jeff Sessions (R-AL), on the upcoming Sotomayor hearings:
"I don’t think the outcome of this hearing is a foregone conclusion," Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the ranking Republican on the committee, told reporters Friday. "Judge Sotomayor has made some troubling statements. ... She has ruled in some cases that are troubling and need to be examined."
Sessions then gives the standard GOP laundry list:
- She's a racist (a.k.a. "wise Latina woman" remark"),
- she'll take away our guns (a.k.a a ruling that top conservative judges agreed with),
- she hates white people (a.k.a. following precedent in the Ricci case), and,
- she's associated with a terrorist organization (a.k.a. the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund).
In other words, same crap, different day. Now, I can appreciate that Sessions has a job to do and wants to do it right. And if Sotomayor had said things like, oh, I don't know, maybe calling the National Association for the Advancement of Colored people and the American Civil Liberties Union "un-American" and "Communist-inspired," or, during a murder investigation of the Ku Klux Klan, said that she "used to think they [the Klan] were OK’ until (s)he found out some of them were ‘pot smokers," or if she made a habit of calling African American men "boys," and cautioned them about how they talked to "white folks," she would be unfit to hold any position of power and respect. Right, Mr. Sessions?