With Senator Jeff Sessions’s Attorney General nomination set for a confirmation hearing next month, he and President-elect Trump’s transition team have tried to rebrand his image into one of civil rights hero, asserting, without evidence, that Sessions has a “strong civil rights record.” Yet throughout his entire career, Sessions has been openly hostile to civil rights advocacy and the lawyers who defend constitutional rights and protect civil liberties for all Americans. Indeed, when a Republican Senate rejected Jeff Sessions for a federal judgeship in 1986, his characterization of civil rights advocacy as “un-American” was a central part of the case against him. The years since have been more of the same; if anything, in speeches and statements throughout his Senate tenure, Sessions’s attacks on civil rights work and the lawyers who do it have only intensified.
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