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The Miers Aftermath II

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A couple of interesting posts at TAPPED. First, Respected Small-Circulation Journal Matt is, I think, correct to say that McConnell would be a very savvy strategic choice. He would be confirmed but in a way that would engender a very bitter struggle, is a near-certain vote to overturn Roe and a certain vote to along with the Republican fusion of church and state. As I mentioned in comments, though, I doubt Bush will pick him, precisely because while he’s a conservative he’s not a hack; not only was he quite critical of Bush v. Gore, more importantly he would be very dubious about Bush’s unlimited-executive-power doctrine. I’ll say this: if Bush nominates him, it’s a serious blow to the Thomas Frank thesis (with which I largely agree) that Republican elites don’t really want Roe overturned.

Then there’s this from Robert Kuttner, which had better be just unfounded speculation:

Option #2: Play it safe and appoint a popular conservative senator from a very Republican state, who would sail through confirmation. Of Judiciary Committee members, Orrin Hatch is too old. Sam Brownback is under 50, but he’s not a lawyer. Bush also has to be peeved at him for his role in the Miers debacle. Ideal candidate: Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, is 58, two years younger than Miers, and a lawyer. He’d be pretty awful, too, and would probably get confirmed.


Jeff Sessions? I’m sure Bush won’t nominate him, but I would really like to think that he couldn’t be confirmed. There is first of all the fact that, as he demonstrated at the Roberts hearings, he’s dumber than a bagful of rocks. In light of the recent discussions of minority vote supression, however, it’s also worth considering why he was rejected by the Senate when Reagan tried to put the man on the bench:

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.

It got worse. Another damaging witness–a black former assistant U.S. Attorney in Alabama named Thomas Figures–testified that, during a 1981 murder investigation involving the Ku Klux Klan, Sessions was heard by several colleagues commenting that he “used to think they [the Klan] were OK” until he found out some of them were “pot smokers.” Sessions claimed the comment was clearly said in jest. Figures didn’t see it that way. Sessions, he said, had called him “boy” and, after overhearing him chastise a secretary, warned him to “be careful what you say to white folks.” Figures echoed Hebert’s claims, saying he too had heard Sessions call various civil rights organizations, including the National Council of Churches and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, “un-American.”

Lovely fellow, isn’t he? And I can’t imagine why civil rights groups would ever dream that states in the Deep South may try to restrict the vote out of anything but concern with voter fraud. But, of course, Sessions also tells us something about the modern GOP; if you’re too racist to get put on the federal bench, there’s always the hallowed halls of the United States Senate:

None of this history stopped Sessions’s political ascension. He was elected attorney general in 1994. Once in office, he was linked with a second instance of investigating absentee ballots and fraud that directly impacted the black community. He was also accused of not investigating the church burnings that swept the state of Alabama the year he became attorney general. But those issues barely made a dent in his 1996 Senate campaign, when Heflin retired and Sessions ran for his seat and won.


Ah, another element of the party of Lincoln turning into the party of Davis. But, at least, I remain confident that even in the debased current Senate he’d meet the same fate he did when Reagan nominated him.

eRobin makes the case for Pryor and McConnell.

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