By Mark Hemingway
Now that Jeff Sessions is Donald Trump's pick for
attorney general, you're going to hear a lot of people dig up old accusations
that Sessions is a racist.
In fact, CNN did so last night.
However, between the
nature of the accusations and Sessions's actual record of desegregating schools
and taking on the Klan in Alabama, it strains credulity to believe that he is a
racist.
These accusations all center around the bruising judicial
nomination process Sessions went through in 1986.
Ronald Reagan had tapped Sessions
to serve on the federal bench and the Senate judiciary committee ultimately
rejected him after they heard testimony that he had supposedly called the ACLU
and NAACP "un-American" and "communist-inspired," as well
as made racist remarks.
The accusations came from Thomas Figures, a black
assistant U.S. attorney who worked for Sessions who said Sessions called him
"boy" and had made a joke about how he thought the KKK was "O.K.
until [he] found out they smoked pot." Another prosecutor, J. Gerald
Hebert, said Sessions had called a white lawyer "a disgrace to his
race" for representing black clients.
There is no concrete reason to doubt Figures or Herbert.
Sessions vehemently denied calling Figures "boy," but he didn't rebut
the substance of some of the claims—though he asserted they were taken out of
context.
It's not exactly inaccurate to point out that the NAACP and ACLU were
"communist-inspired."
Sessions said he thought it absurd to think he would
make a pro-KKK joke considering he was prosecuting the Klan at the time he made
the remark.
And for what it's worth, Figures also directed accusations at a
another assistant U.S. Attorney who worked with Figures. That assistant U.S.
Attorney also said Figures wasn't telling the truth and defended Sessions's
integrity. Ultimately, the charges were no more than hearsay.
However, it's worth noting that Senator Ted Kennedy, on
the Senate judiciary committee at the time, seemed heavily invested in tanking
Sessions nomination. The next year, Kennedy's crusade was to sink Robert Bork's
nomination to the Supreme Court, which has generally been regarded as a
shameful smear campaign ever since.
The episode upended the comity that had
previously existed between the Senate and the White House on Supreme Court
nominations—Antonin Scalia was approved to the court 98-0 the year before, the
same year that Sessions was filleted by Kennedy and Democrats on the judiciary
committee. Perhaps Sessions was a trial run for "Borking."
In 2009, Sessions himself told me that "When I got
to Washington, there had been an orchestrated campaign to smear my record, and
it was executed with great care. And I, frankly, was a babe in the woods and
wasn't sufficiently prepared for it."
For that reason, when Sessions got
to the Senate he has always been more deferential toward nominations than most
of his GOP colleagues. For instance, he was one of the only Republican senators
to support Eric Holder's nomination for attorney general.
Sessions's actual track record certainly doesn't suggest
he's a racist. Quite the opposite, in fact.
As a U.S. Attorney Sessions filed several
cases to desegregate schools in Alabama. And he also prosecuted Klansman Henry
Francis Hays, son of Alabama Klan leader Bennie Hays, for abducting and killing
Michael Donald, a black teenager selected at random. Sessions insisted on the
death penalty for Hays.
When he was later elected the state Attorney General,
Sessions followed through and made sure Hays was executed. The successful
prosecution of Hays also led to a $7 million civil judgment against the Klan,
effectively breaking the back of the KKK in Alabama.
As a U.S. attorney, he also prosecuted a group of civil
rights activists, which included a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr., for
voter fraud in Perry County, Alabama. The case fell apart, and Sessions bluntly
told me he "failed to make the case." This incident has also been
used to claim that Sessions is racist—but it shouldn't be. The county has been
dogged with accusations of voter fraud for decades.
In 2008, state and federal
officials investigated voter fraud in Perry County after "a local citizens
group gathered affidavits detailing several cases in which at least one
Democratic county official paid citizens for their votes, or encouraged them to
vote multiple times."
A detailed story in the Tuscaloosa News reported
that voting patterns in one Perry County town were also mighty suspicious in
2012: "Uniontown has a population of 1,775, according to the 2010 census
but, according to the Perry County board of registrars, has 2,587 registered
voters. The total votes cast there Tuesday—1,431—represented a turnout of 55
percent of the number of registered voters and a whopping 80.6 percent of the
town's population."
Perhaps there are a lot of ideological reasons for
liberals to be upset about Sessions becoming attorney general. But I don't
think the character attacks on the man can be taken seriously.
Correction: A previous version of this post identified
Henry Francis Hays as an Alabama KKK head. He was actually the son of one: Bennie
Hays, who, per his obituary, was accused of "instigating" the murder
for which Henry Hays was executed. The story has been updated.
