It’s A Half-Truth!
Calling Jeff Sessions a “wonk McCarthyite” is indeed far too charitable; the former term implies that he knows something about anything.
I believe this event calls for a link to Sarah Wildman’s classic piece about Sessions, now available in readable format:
Sessions was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama. The year before his nomination to federal court, he had unsuccessfully prosecuted three civil rights workers–including Albert Turner, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr.–on a tenuous case of voter fraud. The three had been working in the “Black Belt” counties of Alabama, which, after years of voting white, had begun to swing toward black candidates as voter registration drives brought in more black voters. Sessions’s focus on these counties to the exclusion of others caused an uproar among civil rights leaders, especially after hours of interrogating black absentee voters produced only 14 allegedly tampered ballots out of more than 1.7 million cast in the state in the 1984 election. The activists, known as the Marion Three, were acquitted in four hours and became a cause celebre. Civil rights groups charged that Sessions had been looking for voter fraud in the black community and overlooking the same violations among whites, at least partly to help reelect his friend Senator Denton.
On its own, the case might not have been enough to stain Sessions with the taint of racism, but there was more. Senate Democrats tracked down a career Justice Department employee named J. Gerald Hebert, who testified, albeit reluctantly, that in a conversation between the two men Sessions had labeled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) “un-American” and “Communist-inspired.” Hebert said Sessions had claimed these groups “forced civil rights down the throats of people.” In his confirmation hearings, Sessions sealed his own fate by saying such groups could be construed as “un-American” when “they involve themselves in promoting un-American positions” in foreign policy. Hebert testified that the young lawyer tended to “pop off” on such topics regularly, noting that Sessions had called a white civil rights lawyer a “disgrace to his race” for litigating voting rights cases. Sessions acknowledged making many of the statements attributed to him but claimed that most of the time he had been joking, saying he was sometimes “loose with [his] tongue.” He further admitted to calling the Voting Rights Act of 1965 a “piece of intrusive legislation,” a phrase he stood behind even in his confirmation hearings.
Alas, between his use of specious “vote fraud” accusations to suppress voting and his crusade against the Voting Rights Act, Sessions was a real Republican visionary.
Hey, if we can breezily fling around accusations being “un-American”, maybe someone named Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III could fall into that category?
Make that “..accusations of being ‘un-American’…”
So just regular McCarthyite?
I wonder what that means.
More like Strom Thurmond reborn.
“Moderate” Republicans find enough common ground with this latter-day Strom Thurmond to share party affiliation with him. Libertarians too.
…at least partly to help reelect his friend Senator Denton.
Jeremiah Denton! There’s a blast from the past. IIRC, he was a prototype for Republicans Saying Idiotic Things About Rape. The Senate was considering a bill that had something to do with penalizing marital rape, and Denton chimed in with a sentiment along the lines of, When you get married, you expect to get a little sex.
As for Sessions, he’s just a good ol’ boy parroting the line about how all them Civil Rights types were outside agimatators and probably Commies.
The best line from the Chait piece, after asking Susan Irving at GAO why she was asked by Republican staffers to only account for the costs of PPACA and not its savings provisions in evaluating its long-term budget impact, is her final response after repeating that it’s is just what they asked her to do: “You have been a reporter long enough to know why I am repeating something verbatim.”
You have to admire someone who knows how to answer a question without actually answering it explicitly because doing so might get them canned.
That was the response of a sheer professional. Beautifully done (as was the rest of the piece, too).
A “wonk McCarthyite” – uhm, no.
A ‘McCarthyite wanker’ – yes.
Make that a ‘racist McCarthyite wanker’.
I prefer to spell it “b-i-g-o-t-e-d a-s-s-h-o-l-e.” The pronunciation is identical, however.
well I suppose he could charitably be considered to be wooden and have someone’s hand up his backside
Really, both sides are to blame here. Sure, Sessions completely lied, distorted, and cherry-picked the findings of the GAO report, but the Democrats should have been more clear about which parts of the law they were gonna repeal in the future.
At first, I thought Speak Truth actually wrote this.
Nah, the Snark-O-Meter(tm) banged right up to 9.5 on this one.
I wonder if Sessions is the father of the GOP’s obsession with things being shoved down their throats. An unpleasant pedigree if you ask moi.
So, gay panic has an even longer pedigree than we thought.
Oh — I saw what you did there.
From the comments on Chait’s piece:
Is Jeff Sessions the worst Republican in the Senate? Maybe.
He’s the only one not from Texas or Oklahoma who even belongs in the conversation.
Mitch McConnell?
Garden-variety bad, albeit with a larger platform.
Rand Paul?
I left him out for the same reason I left out David Vitter: although he’s bad enough, he just doesn’t seem to all that consequential.
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sessions is a vile toad, in no way resembling a human being. notice he’s never had a DNA analysis?
Kind of sounds like Chait got Woodwarded by Sessions’s staff, but instead of whining to Fox News he instead doubled down on his original criticisms.
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