Back in 2002, when the strange phenomena of anti-racist conservative bloggers helped drive Trent Lott from power (hint: he was too prone to striking deals with the Dems), The New Republic ran a piece by Sarah Wildman "Closed Sessions", asking, "Hey, anti-racist conservatives, what about Jeff Sessions?"
His record on race arguably rivals that of the gentleman from Mississippi--and yet has elicited not a peep of consternation from the anti-racist right.
The whole thing's worth a read, but here's the part that really takes me back, because, even in those pre-internet days, thanks to Pacifica radio, and other alternative media, I was well aware of Sessions and his racist shenanigans even before Reagan tried to appoint him as a federal judge:
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 cèlèbre. 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.
He is, in short, the lowest form of racist party hack. And that is, in fact, the foundation of his political career. He was a Sarah Palin-like figure, persecuted by the mean old DC establishment for standing up for the good people of his home state:
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.
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