WASHINGTON—The Senate confirmation hearing of Sen. Jeff Sessions, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Attorney General, is likely to rehash racially charged allegations that derailed his efforts to become a federal judge under the Reagan Administration.
The expected focus on Sessions’ record on race, policing and immigration comes as the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has surged in prominence under the Obama administration.
Lawmakers and advocates expressed concern Friday that Sessions could sideline or undo those civil rights efforts, which have included wide-ranging investigations of police departments for unconstitutional practices and lawsuits meant to protect the rights of transgender individuals, black voters and the disabled.
“Given some of his past statements and his staunch opposition to immigration reform, I am very concerned about what he would do with the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice and want to hear what he has to say,” incoming Democratic minority leader Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York said in a statement.
Sessions’ peers on the Senate Judiciary Committee will almost certainly delve into the Alabama senator’s past statements on race at his confirmation hearing.
The panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, hinted as much on Friday, saying the “American people deserve to learn about Senator Sessions’ record.”
Leahy voted against Sessions for a district judgeship when he last came before the Judiciary Committee in 1986.
During that hearing, Sessions was criticized for joking in the presence of an attorney with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division that the Ku Klux Klan was “OK” until he learned they smoked marijuana. He was also said to have called a black assistant U.S. attorney “boy” and the NAACP “un-American” and “communist-inspired.”
Sessions, a former prosecutor, has said that the racially charged allegations against him have been painful to him and an unfair stain on his public reputation. He called the matter “heartbreaking” in a 2009 CNN interview and described the allegations as “false distortions.”
In defending his record, Sessions is likely to point to his vote to confirm Eric Holder as the country’s first black attorney general and to point to his sponsorship of the bipartisan Fair Sentencing Act, which repealed the mandatory minimum penalty for simple crack possession — a penalty that’s been shown to disproportionately affect black defendants.
When he was U.S. Attorney in Alabama, his office investigated the 1981 murder of Michael Donald, a black man who was kidnapped, beaten and killed by two Klansmen who hanged his body in a tree. The two men were later arrested and convicted.
And Montgomery Circuit Judge Greg Griffin, an African-American lawyer who worked in the civil litigation department under Sessions when he was attorney general, said he never saw any signs Sessions was racially insensitive
But “those incidents don’t obliterate the well-established record of hostility to civil rights enforcement in other areas,” said Wade Henderson, the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Sessions’ civil rights record as a prosecutor and a senator matters because, if confirmed, he would have oversight of a division that Holder has described as the Justice Department’s “crown jewel.”
