Senate Democrats, pick your Trump battle
There are 1,300 positions in the federal government that require Senate confirmation. We have seen only a few of Presidentelect Donald Trump’s choices.
Among the choices generating strong opposition has been Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., for the post of attorney general. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., wasted no time calling on Trump to rescind this nomination.
While such expressions might be comforting to the demoralized base of the Democratic Party, Sessions is unlikely to be the most unpalatable of the many choices Trump will be making in the next few months, and Democrats would do well not to waste their ammunition on someone who’s likely to be confirmed with or without the votes of Democratic senators.
Much of the consternation around Sessions has to do with the post to which Trump proposes to nominate him. The Justice Department has jurisdiction over contentious issues that range from the enforcement of voting rights laws to immigration and intellectual property.
As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a former U.S. attorney, Sessions is professionally qualified.
What seems to have ignited opposition is the fact that he was denied confirmation as a federal judge in 1986 after he was nominated by President Reagan. At the time, witnesses accused Sessions of making racist comments.
Elected in 1996 to the very Senate that had rejected him, Sessions established himself as one of the most conservative members of the upper chamber, but he never adopted the abrasive style that was later to characterize Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.
And at a time when even being seen in the company of Democrats might provoke a primary challenge from the right, Sessions partnered with one of the most liberal members of the Senate, Richard Durbin of Illinois, to reform the visa program that favors foreigners with high-tech skills.
Sessions strongly opposes illegal immigration and opposes recent efforts in Congress to reform immigration law. All of these efforts, in one form or other, grant amnesty to certain groups of individuals who reside in the country without proper documentation. This is a political position that might be excessively, even narrowly, legalistic.
Nonetheless, it is not a form of bigotry, although it is seen as such by many liberals who are now clamoring for Sessions’ rejection by the Senate.
They have even seized on his middle name — Beauregard — much the way some on the right chose to emphasize the Hussein in Obama’s name, suggesting that the nominee is somehow connected to Confederate Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard.
There may well be individuals down the road whose records offer real cause for alarm on the part of Senate Democrats. The Sessions nomination is not terrain worth dying to defend.