President-elect Trump has announced his intention to name Alabama Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III to the position of Attorney General. This Confederate general namesake couldn’t be a worse fit for the job.
As you probably know by now, former President Reagan nominated Sessions for a federal judgeship in 1985 when he was serving as the U.S. Attorney for Alabama. Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee rejected him after evidence of Sessions’ racism emerged. The Huffington Post, provided excerpts from the hearing, including testimony that: Sessions derided the NAACP and the ACLU as un-American and for “trying to force civil rights down the throats of people trying to put problems behind them”; referred to a white civil rights lawyer as a traitor to his race; and warned the only African American Assistant U.S. Attorney to be careful what he said to white people.
Reagan’s selection of Sessions was all the more problematic given his unsuccessful attempt to prosecute Black civil rights leaders for allegedly engaging in voter fraud just four months earlier.