Jeff Sessions’s Constitution

[Jefferson23]

snip* "His views would be absolutely correct under the Confederate Constitution, adopted in 1861."

What a shock, huh?...schmuck.

By Scott Horton

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III of Alabama serves as ranking member of the Judiciary Committee. In that position he is the potential leader of the opposition to judicial candidates, including recent Supreme Court appointee Elena Kagan. Sessions knows the process from the other side, too: after he served as U.S. attorney in Mobile, Ronald Reagan appointed him to a federal judgeship, but Republican senators opposed the nomination after hearing evidence that Sessions had called a black assistant U.S. attorney “boy” and had advised him “be careful what you say to white folks.”

As word of the Kagan nomination was spreading, Sessions formulated the approach he would take to the next nominee in an op-ed published in the Washington Post. In the process he offered a glimpse of his curious ideas about the Constitution:

hen President Obama announces his next Supreme Court nominee, the American people will want to know whether he is choosing someone who is committed to the text of the Constitution and the vision of the Founding Fathers, or whether his nominee is an activist who will shed a judge’s neutral, constitutional role to push a progressive policy agenda.

Sessions goes on to discuss three test cases that distinguish a “neutral” judge from one pursuing a “progressive policy agenda:”

•Citizens United, in which the Supreme Court found that corporations had constitutionally protected rights under the First Amendment in the process of overturning campaign finance limitations. This case, which disregarded more than a century of precedent upholding the legislature’s power to limit the political engagement of corporations, changes the basic rules of the game in American elections, giving a powerful voice to corporations and labor unions. Sessions says it’s justified in terms of “original intent,” but of course there were no corporations of the sort we know today when the Constitution was being deliberated and ratified in 1789. Britain, the Netherlands, and several other colonial powers had crown-chartered corporations, which developed trade with and even exercised political control over foreign territory, but they all cracked down on corporate politicking in the course of the nineteenth century. With the Citizens United decision, America stands alone in the world as a country which grants human rights to corporations, just as it is curtailing human rights to humans. It’s a curious sign of the times.


in full: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/05/hbc-90007029