Senator girding for high court battle
WASHINGTON — California Sen. Dianne Feinstein led her party’s resistance Tuesday to the nomination of Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions as attorney general in the Trump administration, a fight that appears futile, but could serve as a test for the looming battle over a pivotal Supreme Court nomination that could arrive within weeks.
Debuting in her new role as the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Feinstein deployed the earnest fact-marshaling that is her trademark, while ensuring public testimony from the furious opposition to Sessions from a broad collection of civil rights leaders, including Amos C. Brown, pastor of San Francisco’s Third Baptist Church.
As the nation’s top law enforcement officer, the attorney general is among the most sensitive jobs in any administration, in charge of enforcing the nation’s laws, including their application to the president and the rest of the executive branch.
“This job requires service to the people and the law — not to the president,” Feinstein told Sessions. She expressed her “deep concern” that, “there is so much fear in this country. I see it. I hear it. Particularly in the African American community, from preachers, from politicians, from everyday Americans.”
Civil rights groups are deeply worried that Sessions’ hard-core conservatism, especially his narrow interpreta-
tion of federal civil rights laws, makes him a dangerous choice for attorney general. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund issued a 32-page report concluding that Sessions had amassed “a deeply and consistently troubling record on issues of civil rights, racial justice, and equality,” adding, “This is not a close call.”
Protesters punctuated Tuesday’s hearing by periodically shouting, “No Trump, no fascist, no KKK” and other slogans as they were forcibly removed from the packed Beaux Arts room.
But Sessions, an Alabama senator for two decades, has won unreserved support from his fellow Republicans and appears headed for confirmation. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, one of the last GOP moderates on Capitol Hill and among the most likely to switch sides on any issue, personally introduced Sessions as “a trusted colleague and a good friend,” and “a person of integrity and principle.”
Feinstein and other Democrats, however, raised many areas of concern during the daylong hearing, drawing on Sessions’ long voting record that positioned him as a voice of the far right. As polite and modest in his personal bearing as his policy positions are doctrinaire, Sessions “is someone who many of us on this committee have worked with for 20 years,” Feinstein said. “That makes this very difficult for me.”
Drawing a distinction between his role as senator and that as attorney general, Sessions pledged to abide by laws with which he personally disagrees.
He said unequivocally that waterboarding is “illegal,” despite President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to use such torture against suspected terrorists, and also promised to recuse himself from any potential investigation of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of state. During the campaign, Trump vowed to direct his attorney general to open such an investigation.
Sessions had previously said he would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton. The FBI investigation into her email server is closed and a preliminary investigation into the Clinton Foundation is open, but officials have said there is little basis to go forward.
Defending himself against charges that he is racist, Sessions told the panel that as someone raised in Alabama he had witnessed discrimination firsthand. “I deeply understand the history of civil rights and the horrendous impact that relentless and systemic discrimination and the denial of voting rights has had on our African American brothers and sisters,” he said.
Brown, the San Francisco pastor, said outside the hearing room that he mistrusted such avowals, based on Trump’s “divisive and racist politics, all the misogyny, and all the dishonesty.”
Sessions was the first, and for months, the only GOP senator to endorse Trump last year, finding common ground with the president-elect’s hard-line views on immigration. As senator, he fought relentlessly against efforts to overhaul immigration law, arguing that the record influx of low-wage workers was undermining the wages and economic prospects of U.S. workers.
Clear and unwavering in his beliefs, Sessions stuck by that position Tuesday, declaring that President Obama’s executive order to protect immigrants brought by their parents into the country as children without authorization from deportation is an amnesty that abrogates legislative authority. While acknowledging the need to address so-called Dreamers on humanitarian grounds, Sessions said that responsibility lies with Congress.
Sessions disavowed a Trump proposal to ban Muslim immigration, saying there could be no religious test for any immigrant. He added, however, that religious beliefs cannot be eliminated entirely as a reason to deny admission if a person claims them as a motive for murder.
He also defended his belief that the landmark Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision holding that women have a right to abortion was wrongheaded, but said he would abide by the law.
Democrats have no power to filibuster the Sessions nomination or any other Trump nominees. Frustrated by GOP intransigence over Obama’s appointees, Democrats eliminated that tool in 2013 for all nominations except the Supreme Court.
Upon taking office on Jan. 20, Trump will be able to nominate his pick to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left open since February by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, anchor of the court’s right wing. Senate Republicans took the unprecedented step of refusing to hold a hearing on Obama nominee Merrick Garland. Democrats will soon have to decide whether to filibuster a Trump Supreme Court nominee.
But if Democrats deploy the filibuster, they run the risk that Republicans will remove that weapon by changing the rules, the so-called “nuclear option,” leaving Democrats helpless to block any future Trump Supreme Court nominee.