As if we need yet another reason to block the confirmation of Jeff Sessions as attorney general with all of our might, a recent review of court filings shows us more proof that he has a hideous record on civil rights—possibly only rivaled by that of another famous Alabaman, George Wallace.
Back in the early 1990s, public schools in rural parts of the state were (pardon the pun) deplorable. No textbooks, safety hazards (like exposed wires and leaky ceilings) in classrooms, and high school students fundamentally unprepared for the workforce, with less reading, writing and math skills than eighth grade students. As you might have guessed, this disproportionately impacted black and poor students.
Alabama educators filed a civil rights lawsuit in 1993 in an attempt to receive more state funding for those schools most in need. Luckily, the courts declared the aforementioned conditions to be in violation of Alabama’s Constitution. While then-Gov. Guy Hunt vowed to cooperate with the verdict and to improve school conditions for the most marginalized of students, Jeff Sessions, then the state’s attorney general, felt quite differently.
The legal argument Sessions made — again and again, and in the face of repeated rebuffs — turned on his view of the separation of powers. Only the legislature had the authority to decide how Alabama funded its schools, he maintained. Indeed, Sessions never spent a legal sentence arguing that Alabama’s educational system was equitable, that it didn’t clearly favor white and wealthier children while short-changing others. He simply argued the courts had no rightful place saying or doing anything about it.
What kind of creep you have to be to block equitable funding to poor school children? A pretty big one. And you’d have to be downright cruel to spend years litigating the case so that any mandates to work on reform stall before actual change can be implemented.
He hired expensive private lawyers to fight the findings of the court — first at the district level, later at the state Supreme Court level. He succeeded in removing a judge sympathetic to the plight of poor students from the case. He filed appeal after appeal, insisting he be heard even after the state’s highest court issued final decisions. He fought every effort by the court to require that schools in the state’s poorer communities be funded at the same levels as its wealthier ones.
In the end, it worked.
His legal jousting across his two years as attorney general effectively prevented any overhaul to the way schools were financed in Alabama, and as a result helped drag out a case that would ultimately collapse years later when the makeup of the state’s top court turned over.
And the poor children of Alabama still suffer. Students in poor districts still don’t receive enough for textbooks for each student, with poor schools also unable to afford training for teachers to learn to serve students with developmental disabilities. In Greene County, the least populous county in Alabama, only 1 percent of seventh graders are proficient in math. Statewide, only 50 percent of students meet reading standards, well below the national average.
For a person applying for the job as the nation’s top civil rights defender, it becomes more obvious each day that Jeff Sessions cares nothing about defending rights, least of all the rights of anyone who isn’t white and wealthy. Way to live up to the legacy of the slavery-supporting confederate soldiers you were named after, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.