Jeff Sessions Cannot Be Trusted to Enforce Civil Rights Law as Attorney General
By Marc H. Morial
President & CEO, National Urban League
It is clear that Sessions is unfit to to serve as chief enforcer of civil rights laws.
Earlier this week, civil rights activists were arrested after a day-long occupation of the Mobile, Alabama office of U.S. Attorney General nominee Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. The sit-in was organized to protest Sessions’ hostile attitude toward civil rights and the Voting Rights Act.
Also this week, a group of more than 1,100 distinguished professors of law sent a letter to Congress urging the rejection of his nomination. “Nothing in Senator Sessions’ public life since 1986 has convinced us that he is a different man than the 39-year-old attorney who was deemed too racially insensitive to be a federal district court judge.”
Never in recent memory has a nominee for U.S. Attorney General faced such united and widespread opposition. President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Sessions sets the stage for an unprecedented rollback of racial justice, immigration policy, LGBTQ rights and gender equality, among other hard-fought for gains in the American struggle towards equality for all its citizens.
It is clear that Sessions is unfit to to serve as chief enforcer of civil rights laws. We join the rest of the civil rights and legal community and all defenders of equal rights in asking the Senate to reject Sessions’ nomination.
