Major newspapers disappear Sessions' alleged history of racial insensitivity

[NNN0LHI]

http://mediamatters.org/research/200907140058

July 14, 2009 8:54 pm ET

SUMMARY: On July 14, five major newspapers reported on Jeff Sessions' opening statement at the confirmation hearing of Judge Sonia Sotoamyor without noting that, in 1986, Sessions' nomination as a U.S. district court judge was rejected following allegations that Sessions had a history of making racially charged comments.

[Captain Hilts]

1. He is truly is the kind of racist shit that folks here randomly accuse conservatives of being. nt

[BlooInBloo]

2. "insensitivity"? "charged"?

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

[Canuckistanian]

4. "alleged?"

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

[PA Democrat]

3. Sessions went much further than just making racist statements.

As a US Attorney he prosecuted three individuals for voter fraud for their "crime" of registering black voters. They were acquitted because there was NO evidence of fraud. And Sessions has continued to act in ways that should be an embarrassment to the Republican party (if they had any sense of human dignity):

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=8dd230f6-355f-4362-89cc-2c756b9d8102

<snip>

None of this history stopped Sessions's political ascension. He was elected attorney general in 1994. Once in office, he was linked with a second instance of investigating absentee ballots and fraud that directly impacted the black community. He was also accused of not investigating the church burnings that swept the state of Alabama the year he became attorney general. But those issues barely made a dent in his 1996 Senate campaign, when Heflin retired and Sessions ran for his seat and won.

Since his election as a senator, Sessions has not done much to make amends for his past racial insensitivity. His voting record in the Senate has earned him consistent "F"s from the NAACP. He supported an ultimately unsuccessful effort to end affirmative action programs in the federal government (a measure so extreme that many conservatives were against it), he opposed hate-crimes laws, and he opposed a motion to investigate the disproportionate number of minorities in juvenile detention centers. Says Hillary Shelton, director of the NAACP's Washington bureau, " voting record is disturbing. ... He has consistently opposed the bread-and-butter civil rights agenda." But it has been on judicial nominees that Sessions has really made a name for himself. When Sessions grabbed Heflin's Senate seat in 1996, he also nabbed a spot on the Judiciary Committee. Serving on the committee alongside some of the senators who had dismissed him 16 years earlier, Sessions has become a cheerleader for the Bush administration's judicial picks, defending such dubious nominees as Charles Pickering, who in 1959 wrote a paper defending Mississippi's anti-miscegenation law, and Judge Dennis Shedd, who dismissed nearly every fair-employment civil rights case brought before him as a federal district court judge. Sessions called Pickering "a leader for racial harmony" and a "courageous," "quality individual" who was being used as a "political pawn." Regarding Shedd, he pooh-poohed the criticism, announcing that the judge "should have been commended for the rulings he has made," not chastised.