Perhaps you thought you’d heard everything hiding behind the white sheets in Jeff Sessions’ skeleton closet. Nope. As the Senate warms up the comfiest seat for a one-of-our-own coronation of Sessions, here’s a few more reasons why someone should slip in a tack.
First up, your daily reminder that Sessions is a racist jackass who has no business running the Justice Department.
Alabama is nearly 30 percent black, but only three African American judges have ever sat on a federal bench there. Advocates for judicial diversity in the state say that in recent decades, that's thanks largely to Jeff Sessions, the Republican senator from Alabama whom Donald Trump has nominated to be his attorney general. …
For years, Democrats have tried to remedy the inequality in Alabama's court system by appointing more black judges. Nearly every time, Sessions has succeeded in stopping them.
Next, another example of Sessions’ role as a cheerful soldier in the war on women.
President-elect Donald Trump's pick to be attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), has voted numerous times against expanded access to health care. He has cast just one vote in recent years to expand health care access. The group he believed deserved better access to coverage? Fetuses.
Finally, Sessions steps up to show that he’s all-in on post-truth.
Attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions did not disclose his ownership of oil interests on land in Alabama as required by federal ethics rules, according to an examination of state records and independent ethics lawyers who reviewed the documents.
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Sessions’ racist attitudes kept him from being named to the federal bench himself in 1986. In testimony before the Senate, a fellow prosecutor said that Sessions’ referred to him as “boy” while another co-worker noted Sessions’ “joking” about how he liked the KKK. But Sessions’ attitude toward black judicial candidates was no joke.
"The senator has a problem putting African Americans on the federal bench in Alabama," says John Saxon, a Birmingham-based attorney who served on a committee in the 1990s that recommended nominees for judgeships in the state. "And the people need to know that."
When Sessions declared that the issue with all the candidates put forward was not that they were black, but too liberal, Sessions was challenged to provide an African American candidate that he did approve of. But even conservative judges appointed by Reagan somehow failed some subtle, so-hard-to-define internal test from Sessions.
Saxon's committee eventually decided that filling the Southern District vacancy with an African American was hopeless and put forward Donald Briskman, a respected Jewish lawyer in Mobile. Sessions blocked him, too, according to Saxon.
When it comes to Sessions feelings about health care, he doesn’t mess around. He not only voted to give healthcare only to unborn children, he did so by taking funds directly away from women.
In 2008, Sessions voted yes on an amendment to remove pregnant women from the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and instead give coverage to the fetus. At the time of the vote, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) described the amendment as follows: "It takes it away from the woman and gives it to the fetus.”
Fetus covered. Pregnant women? Not covered. It’s hard to think of a vote that more clearly draws the line around what the Republican Party values.
And finally, there’s Sessions’ little error in filling out his paperwork for the AG position.
The Alabama records show that Sessions owns subsurface rights to oil and other minerals on more than 600 acres in his home state, some of which are adjacent to a federal wildlife preserve.
Sessions didn’t bother to mention this. But hey, let’s look at how Sessions responded when an Obama nominee to a much less important position failed to be a completist in listing all the articles he had written for law reviews.
“At best, this nominee’s extraordinary disregard for the Committee’s constitutional role demonstrates incompetence; at worst, it creates the impression that he knowingly attempted to hide his most controversial work from the Committee,” the letter read.
There you go. Replace “this nominee” with “Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III” and you can reuse the whole thing.
Hearings on Sessions are expected to begin Tuesday.