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On Friday, President-elect Donald Trump officially nominated US Senator from Alabama Jeff Sessions to his cabinet as attorney general.
Sessions, who has long been a Trump supporter, helped the president-elect draft an immigration plan last year and has on multiple occasions backed Trump’s plan to temporarily ban Muslim immigrants from entering the country.
“Well, all I can tell you is, the public data that we have had indicate that there are quite a number of countries in that region that have sent a large number of people that have become terrorists,” Sessions said on CNN in June.
In 1986, when Sessions was a state attorney in Alabama, he was nominated by former President Ronald Reagan for a federal judge position. But after people came forward during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing alleging that Sessions had made several racist comments about civil rights organizations, the Senate voted against his appointment by a 10-8 vote.
Thomas Figures, who was at the time an assistant attorney and worked for Sessions, testified in 1986 that the state attorney had called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) “un-American,” and suggested that they were “Communist-inspired.”
NAACP Alabama chapter President Benard Simelton told BuzzFeed News that the organization was “saddened” by news of Sessions’ nomination.
He said that the senator’s past comments about the NAACP and the ACLU were unfounded and racist and that Sessions “alluded to the fact that the work that we were doing was only hurting us and did not help our cause.
“If you read between the lines on that, he’s saying that we need to stay in our place and not raise these types of issues,” Simelton added.
If Sessions accepts his nomination, the Senate — which has a Republican majority — will have to confirm his seat. Simelton doesn’t think that will happen.
Evan Vucci / AP Photo
“This has nothing to do with his party affiliation. It has to do with his positions on civil rights and equality for all people,” he said.
But several GOP senators have already said that despite their strong opposition to some of Sessions' policies on immigration and criminal justice reform, they plan to vote for him.
Council on American-Islamic Relations National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper told BuzzFeed News that Sessions’ possible appointment “only adds to a growing list of appointments and nominations with troubling pasts and troubling histories of bigotry and intolerance.”
Hooper added that other appointees like Steve Bannon as chief strategist and Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as national security adviser also “have very disturbing Islamophobic backgrounds, and backgrounds in which they’ve targeted other minorities.”
He added, “This is something that should be a concern for all Americans.”
ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said in a statement that the organization would not support or oppose presidential or judicial nominations, but would instead “educate the American people and the Congress about nominees’ records and past positions.
“Sen. Sessions has called the ACLU un-American and communist, assertions we flatly reject,” Romero said.
“His positions on LGBT rights, capital punishment, abortion rights, and presidential authority in times of war have been contested by the ACLU and other civil rights organizations,” he added.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit organization based in Montgomery, Alabama, that works to combat hate and intolerance through education and litigation, acknowledged the help they received from Sessions during the 1980s in which Michael Donald, a black man, was lynched by members of the Ku Klux Klan but said it "cannot support his nomination to be the country’s next attorney general,” according to a statement.
“Senator Sessions not only has been a leading opponent of sensible, comprehensive immigration reform, he has associated with anti-immigrant groups we consider to be deeply racist, including the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Center for Security Policy,” the statement read.
“If our country is to move forward, we must put all forms of racism behind us.”
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