GOP Appoints Racist to Judiciary Committee
GOP Appoints Racist to Judiciary Committee
On Tuesday, the GOP announced that Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) will replace Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter (Republican now turned Democrat) as the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee. This Judiciary Committee is responsible for approving judicial nominees - most importantly - Supreme Court nominees.
--a black former assistant U.S. Attorney in Alabama named Thomas Figures--testified that, during a 1981 murder investigation involving the Ku Klux Klan, Sessions was heard by several colleagues commenting that he "used to think they [the Klan] were OK" until he found out some of them were "pot smokers
Sessions had called a white civil rights lawyer a "disgrace to his race" for litigating voting rights cases.
Senate Democrats tracked down a career Justice Department employee named J. Gerald Hebert, who testified, albeit reluctantly, that in a conversation between the two men Sessions had labeled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) "un-American" and "Communist-inspired." Hebert said Sessions had claimed these groups "forced civil rights down the throats of people."