Legal Commentary

Sessions Attacks Civil Rights Groups, This Time The PRLDF

By Big Tent Democrat

Two decades ago, it was the NAACP. Today it is the PRDLF. Here is the video of Sessions admitting he did so from 23 years ago:

This morning, Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions (R-AL), attacked Judge Sonia Sotomayopr for being on the Board of Director of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense amd Education Fund. As Ian Millheiser noted, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions has a long history of opposing civil rights and groups that advocate for civil rights:

As a federal prosecutor, Sessions conducted a tenuous criminal investigation into voting rights advocates that registered African-Americans to vote -- an investigation that culminated in an unsuccessful prosecution against a former aide to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He once quipped that he "used to think [the KKK] were OK" until he found out some of them were "pot smokers;" and he routinely referred to an African-American attorney who worked for him as "boy" -- even once warning that attorney to "be careful what you say to white folks" after Sessions overheard him chastising a white secretary.

Moreover, Sessions remains unrepentant for these incidents, although he did reluctantly concede at his confirmation hearing that it "probably was wrong" when he attacked the NAACP as an "un-American" and "Communist-inspired" organizations that "forced civil rights down the throats of people." [See video above]]

Sessions' assault on Sotomayor and PRLDEF has largely been met with skepticism -- New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, for example, commented that "[o]nly in Washington could someone's many years of volunteer service to a highly regarded nonprofit organization that has done so much good for so many be twisted into a negative" -- and its puzzling that conservatives permitted Sessions to be the public face of their opposition to the first Latina nominated to the Supreme Court. Sessions' anti-PRLDEF campaign is not only baseless; it is reminiscent of his decades-old comments about the NAACP that kept him off the federal bench years ago.

(Emphasis supplied.) Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on July 13, 2009 (boomark / email).