Jeff Sessions’ Confirmation as U.S. Attorney General: 5 Things to Know

Sen. Jeff Sessions, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for U.S. attorney general, will have a tough time winning confirmation if three Wisconsin law professors are successful in swaying the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will hold hearings Jan. 10-11, to reject him. They join some 1,140 law professors nationwide who oppose the Alabama Republican’s confirmation as the nation’s top law enforcement official.

The letter — signed in Wisconsin by Lisa Mazzie, a Marquette law faculty member, and Wisconsin law professors Tonya Brito and Martha Gaines — outlines the legal scholars’ concerns that Sessions “will not fairly enforce our nation’s laws and promote justice and equality in the United States.” They urge the Judiciary Committee to block his confirmation, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

The signatories, who come from 170 law schools in 48 states, noted that the U.S. attorney general has “broad jurisdiction and prosecutorial discretion, which means that, if confirmed, Jeff Sessions would be responsible for the enforcement of the nation’s civil rights, voting, immigration, environmental, employment, national security, surveillance, antitrust, and housing laws.”

Prominent law professors who signed the letter include Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School, Geoffrey Stone of the University of Chicago Law School, Pamela S. Karlan of Stanford Law School and Erwin Chemerinsky of the University of California at Irvine School of Law.

Sessions spokeswoman Sarah Flores dismissed the importance of the letter, calling the legal scholars' concerns “false portrayals” that “will fail as tired, recycled, hyperbolic charges that have been thoroughly rebuked and discredited,” The Washington Post reported.

Here are five things to know about Sessions and the confirmation process:

1. Sessions also faces opposition from the NAACP. Five members of the NAACP, including the organization’s president, were arrested after staging a sit-in Tuesday at Sessions’ offices in Mobile, Alabama. In an interview with The Washington Post, NAACP President William Brooks said Sessions “does not acknowledge the reality of voter suppression while mouthing faith in the myth of voter fraud.”

2. Sessions has been there before. In 1986, the Senate defeated President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Sessions, then a U.S. attorney for Alabama, to the federal bench. Sessions’ rejection was in part a backlash over his 1985 prosecution of three black activists, including a former adviser to slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., for voter fraud.

The lawyers signing the letter cited that case as a chief concern in their opposition to Sessions’ confirmation but noted: “Nothing in Senator Sessions’ public life since 1986 has convinced us that he is a different man than the 39-year-old attorney who was deemed too racially insensitive to be a federal district court judge.”

3. The testimony against Sessions in the 1986 confirmation hearings was damning. It came mostly from a former deputy attorney, Thomas Figures, who is black. He said Sessions told him to choose his words carefully with “white folks,” called him “boy” on multiple occasions and joked that Ku Klux Klan members seemed “OK, until he learned that they smoked marijuana.”

Additionally, Justice Department lawyer J. Gerald Hebert testified that Sessions had referred to both the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union as “un-American,” “Communist-inspired” organizations.

4. Sessions’ supporters say he has been maligned. They champion not only his prosecution of a Klansman for the murder of a black teenager but also lawsuits he filed to stop the segregation of schools, a 2006 Senate vote expanding the Voting Rights Act and his Senate vote in 2009 to confirm Eric Holder as the country’s first African-American attorney general.

“It’s really a shame to see people tarnish the name of such a good man,” Rep. Martha Roby, a Montgomery Republican, told Al.com. “I doubt most of the people attacking Sen. Sessions know him or have even met him. I do know Jeff Sessions and I can tell you that he is a man of the highest character and integrity. He probably has a better understanding of the rule of law than anyone in elected office.”

5. Blocking Sessions won’t be easy. Democrats have themselves to blame. In a tempest over Republican delays on President Obama’s cabinet nominees in 2013, the Democrats pushed through what’s known as the “nuclear option,” which allows for simple majority votes for presidential appointments to the executive branch and judiciary, with the exception of Supreme Court justices.

Now that the tables are turned and Republicans control Congress and, soon, the White House, Democrats don’t have a crucial weapon they need to reject Sessions.

Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr Commons