Jeff Sessions a Threat to Civil Rights
He will be the most dangerous on issues where the Obama administration has been the most successful.
By Ari Berman
... on the 20th anniversary of the march from Selma to Montgomery, Sessions, as US Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, prosecuted Turner, his wife Evelyn, and his fellow civil-rights activist Spencer Hogue on voter-fraud charges, claiming that they had illegally helped black voters cast absentee ballots. The three were accused of improperly collecting and, in a few cases, filling out the ballots on behalf of elderly and sometimes illiterate voters—a tactic that was frequently used by white candidates in Alabama but never prosecuted. Sessions was the first US Attorney to charge civil-rights activists with voter fraud since the Voting Rights Act became law. The trial occurred in Selma, of all places, and the jury acquitted the defendants of all charges after just three hours of deliberation.
The voter-fraud prosecutions were a major reason why the Senate rejected Sessions for a federal judgeship after he was nominated by Ronald Reagan in 1986. In addition, lawyers at the Justice Department and the US Attorney’s Office testified that Sessions had called the NAACP and the ACLU “communist-inspired” and “un-American” groups that were “trying to force civil rights down the throats of people”; addressed the first black prosecutor in Alabama as “boy” and told him “to be careful what he said to white folks”; and dubbed a white civil-rights lawyer “a disgrace to his race.”
Back then, Senator Ted Kennedy called Sessions “a throwback to a shameful era which I know both black and white Americans thought was in our past.” Coretta Scott King told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Sessions would “irreparably damage the work of my husband.”
... there’s little evidence that Sessions has changed. Despite pledging “aggressive enforcement of our laws to ensure access to the ballot for every eligible American voter,” Sessions stuck by his characterization of the Voting Rights Act as “intrusive” and said “it was a good feeling” when the Supreme Court gutted the law. He said that voter-ID laws were “OK” and don’t “appear to be” discriminatory, even though courts in North Carolina and Texas have found such laws to be intentionally discriminatory against black and Latino voters. When Sessions was pressed about the court decisions, he claimed that he was “not familiar” with them, despite their being among the highest-profile cases filed by the Obama Justice Department ...
https://www.thenation.com/article/as-attorney-general-jeff-sessions-would-be-a-threat-to-civil-rights/