Donald Trump just picked Sen. Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama,to be his nominee for the next Attorney General of the United States. That’s unsettling news for anyone who cares about civil rights in America.
For the last eight years, we had a Justice Department that stood up for the Constitution. Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch defended the right to vote and worked to reform our broken criminal justice system.
Sessions and Trump, harnessing a campaign that gave voice to a toxic mix of racism, misogyny and xenophobia, will try to undo that progress.
Start with Sessions himself. In 1986, a conservative U.S. Senate blocked his nomination for a federal judgeship due to his racist actions and words. According to testimony at the time, Sessions had agreed that a prominent white attorney defending African-American clients was “a disgrace to his race.” A black prosecutor said Sessions called him “boy.”
He is also the country’s most anti-immigrant senator, and we’re not only talking here about aggressive deportation of undocumented immigrants. He even opposes many forms of legal immigration. Emma Lazarus, he’s not.
Out of the 320 million people in the United States, it’s hard to find a more alarming choice.
Why does it matter? The Justice Department is charged with defending our most fundamental right, voting. Under Obama, the department helped challenged discriminatory laws nationwide.
A Texas law was blocked for 2016, helping 608,000 people without photo ID. In North Carolina, where a court ruled cuts to early voting were targeted with “surgical precision” to exclude African Americans, the DOJ and others, stepped up.
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