By Michael Kaufman

 

It is a good thing I will never get nominated to be a Supreme Court justice. My meltdown would come early in the hearings. Just listening to some of the comments of the Republican yahoos during the Senate confirmation hearing for Judge Sonia Sotomayor got my blood boiling. And I’m not even a wise Latina woman!

 

And no one heated up my corpuscles more than Jefferson Beauregard “Jeff” Sessions III, the junior senator from Alabama and the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania used to be the top Republican but he switched parties recently when he saw the GOP’s big tent shrink to the size of a lean-to occupied mainly by right-wing extremists and Christian fundamentalists. Those folks think Specter is “too liberal,” which is scary to anyone of the progressive persuasion who remembers the hatchet job he did on Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings or, for that matter, who is aware of his current anti-labor stance regarding the Employee Free Choice Act. (Speaking of stances, is Larry Craig still in the Senate?)

 

Alas for progressives, Sessions is a worse spectre than Specter. Sessions has become the darling of Rush (Big Fat Idiot) Limbaugh and other loudmouths of his ilk in attacking Judge Sotomayor’s involvement with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. After helping to create an atmosphere in which Limbaugh, et al, have been repeatedly calling Judge Sotomayor a “racist” for weeks, Sessions demagogically, albeit wisely, distanced himself from the epithet as the hearings began.

 

After all, he said, he knows what it is like to be wrongly called a racist. Only in his case it is not so wrongly. As Ian Millhiser, a legal research analyst for ThinkProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, writes, “Sessions’ decision to embrace the right-wing attack on civil rights law says a lot more about Jeff Sessions than it does about Sonia Sotomayor.” Millhiser notes that it was precisely because of his deeply rooted “hostility to the very notion of civil rights” that the Senate rejected Sessions for an appointment as a federal judge in 1986.

 

Millhiser cites three examples, at least two of which would qualify Sessions as racist in my book. As a federal prosecutor, Sessions conducted a “tenuous investigation” into voting rights advocates seeking to register African-American voters. The investigation ended in an unsuccessful attempt to prosecute an aide to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

Sessions referred to the NAACP and the ACLU as “un-American” and “Communist-inspired” organizations that “forced civil rights down the throats of people.” Millhiser notes that when recently confronted with these quotes, Sessions conceded they were “probably wrong,” however, he continued to stand by a statement that the Voting Rights Act is “a piece of intrusive legislation.”

 

Finally, Millhiser cites comments from an African-American lawyer who said Sessions referred to him as “boy” and admonished him for speaking critically to a secretary, saying, “Be careful what you say to white folks.” Oh, and Sessions also told the lawyer he had thought the Ku Klux Klan was “okay” until he found out that some of the members were pot smokers. What, did he see them smoking pot while going about their more acceptable behavior like cross burnings and lynchings? This man is questioning Sonia Sotomayor about whether she can be impartial in cases that involve racial issues? Are you kidding me?

 

Judge Sotomayor has remained polite and gracious throughout the baiting questions asked by Sessions and other Republicans on the committee. She has to do this because if she has a meltdown it might jeopardize her confirmation. So, on her behalf and my own I say to Jefferson Beauregard “Jeff” Sessions III, junior senator from Alabama and ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee: Shut the hell up!

 

Michael can be reached at michael@zestoforange.com.

 

 

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