Race takes center stage at Sessions hearing
Black congressional leaders urge rejection of senator for AG job
WASHINGTON — Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Alabama Republican nominated for attorney general, came under sharp attack from black leaders Wednesday over his record on minorities, as Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, a luminary of the civil rights movement, charged that he could set back racial progress by decades.
“We need someone as attorney general who’s going to look out for all of us, and not just some of us,” Lewis, a Democrat, told the Senate Judiciary Committee on the second and final day of testimony for Sessions’ nomination.
The emotional testimony from Lewis and other black leaders provided some dramatic moments at the hearing, but there was no indication that it would slow Sessions’ confirmation in the Senate, which appears all but certain.
Republican members on the committee came to his defense at the hearing and said that he was being unfairly tarnished over accusations of racial insensitivity that have dogged him since the 1980s.
They produced witnesses, including several black conservatives, who vouched for Sessions’ character and professionalism and said they were confident that he would enforce the law no matter what his personal views were.
Larry D. Thompson, a friend of Sessions’ who worked with him in the 1980s when both were federal prosecutors, said the senator had “a commitment to both strong law enforcement and equal justice for all.” Previous judgeship rejection
The day’s testimony highlighted the strong racial undertones of Sessions’ nomination. Three decades ago, the Senate rejected Sessions for a federal judgeship over questions about his failed prosecution of African-Americans in a fraud case and racially insensitive comments he was reported to have made. He acknowledged using words like “un-American” to describe the NAACP.
Black leaders say that those accusations still resonate with them and that his votes as a senator in more recent years in opposition to a number of civil rights bills have given them more reason to question his record.
About a dozen members of the Congressional Black Caucus, along with civil rights leaders, turned out at Wednesday’s hearing in support of Lewis and two other black Democrats — Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana — as they voiced their opposition to Sessions’ nomination.
Booker broke with Senate tradition by testifying against a fellow senator, a decision that he cast as a matter of “conscience and country.”
He alluded to Sessions’ opposition to immigration and his support for voter-identification laws that disproportionately affect minorities and the poor.
“He will be expected to defend voting rights, but his record indicates that he won’t,” Booker said. “He will be expected to defend the rights of immigrants and affirm their human dignity, but his record indicates that he won’t.” Letter calls Sessions ‘unfit’
Lewis, who protested segregation alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and was beaten severely during a march in Selma, Ala., said Sessions’ pledge to enforce “law and order” harked back to the era in which he grew up.
“Those who are committed to equal justice in our society wonder whether Senator Sessions’ call for law and order will mean today what it meant in Alabama when I was coming up back then,” Lewis said.
Lewis urged senators to focus on those views.
“It doesn’t matter how Senator Sessions may smile, how friendly he may be, how he may speak to you,” he said.
Democrats challenging Sessions’ nomination also released a letter from 103 black ministers and religious leaders, who wrote that the senator’s “unswerving hostility to the very rights he would be tasked with protecting” had made him “unfit” to be attorney general.
Republicans, however, countered with their own testimonial. Just as Lewis was about to testify, Trump transition team members circulated photographs showing Sessions and Lewis marching together over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to commemorate the 50th anniversary of a confrontation there between civil rights marchers and the police.