Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Not-the-best for Attorney General

Americans deserve the best, and Senator Sessions is not one of them.

Using the approach suggested in How to Select an American President by James A. George with James A. Rodger (c) 2017 Archway Publishing, here is how Senator Jeff Sessions appears.

Sessions is a professional politician, who built his career beginning as a private practice attorney. Being from Alabama and living through periods of racial strife in that state, Sessions has prosecuted African-American protestors as he has initiated prosecution of members of the KKK. That does not imply that his views are particularly balanced.

Investigators must dig deeper, though not too deeply, to discover that he has been rejected in the past as being unfit to serve as a judge. Alabama citizens elected him to serve as their state's Attorney General.

In essence, Sessions is damaged goods. However, the Trump administration is elevating him with the backdrop of charges that the incumbent regime is racist. A Sessions confirmation would seal the brand for Trump as cases are being presented to the court.

His Wiki bio is as follows:

"Jeff Sessions
United States Attorney General
Nominee
President    Donald Trump
United States Senator from Alabama
Incumbent Assumed office January 3, 1997
44th Attorney General of Alabama
In office January 16, 1995 – January 3, 1997
United States Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama
In office 1981–1993
Nominated by    Ronald Reagan
President    Ronald Reagan
George H. W. Bush
Personal details
Born    Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III
December 24, 1946 (age 70)
Selma, Alabama, U.S.
Political party    Republican
Spouse(s)    Mary Blackshear
Children    3
Education    Huntingdon College (BA)
University of Alabama (JD)
Military service
Allegiance United States
Service/branch United States Army
Years of service 1973–1977
Rank    US-O3 insignia SVG Captain
Unit    1184th United States Army Transportation Terminal Unit
United States Army Reserve" 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Sessions
The Washington Post summarizes the Sessions assessment as part of it is posted here.

"The basics: Sessions has served as a senator from Alabama for two decades. But Alabama is such a loyal state to its top lawmakers that Sessions is actually the junior senator from the state; Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R) has been in office three decades.
[Here are the people whose names have been floated for Trump’s Cabinet]
Sessions is popular back home: Aside from his first election in 1996, Sessions has never won with less than 59 percent of the vote. In 2014, he ran unopposed. 
His full name is: Jefferson Beauregard “Jeff” Sessions III. 
He's “amnesty's worst enemy”: The conservative National Review crowned Sessions with that title in 2014, with good reason. Sessions has opposed nearly every immigration bill that has come before the Senate the past two decades that has included a path to citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally. 
He's also fought legal immigration, including guest worker programs for immigrants in the country illegally and visa programs for foreign workers in science, math and high-tech. In 2007, Sessions got a bill passed essentially banning for 10 years federal contractors who hire illegal immigrants. 
“Legal immigration is the primary source of low-wage immigration into the United States,” Sessions argued in a 2015 Washington Post op-ed. " . . . What we need now is immigration moderation: slowing the pace of new arrivals so that wages can rise, welfare rolls can shrink and the forces of assimilation can knit us all more closely together.”

Sessions endorses Trump in February (John Bazemore/AP) 
He's a debt hawk and a military hawk: Sessions, a lawyer before he became a politician, is known for touring Alabama with charts warning of the United States' “crippling” debt. On foreign policy, Sessions has advocated a get-tough approach, once voting against an amendment banning “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” of prisoners. 
These are two positions that could put him at odd with the president he'll serve: Trump has expensive plans that involve significant spending, like $1 trillion on an infrastructure program — and he campaigned on a strong noninterventionist worldview (often claiming, inaccurately, that he opposed the Iraq War before it started). 
He's a climate change skeptic: Here's Sessions in a 2015 hearing questioning Environmental Protection Agency's Gina McCarthy: “Carbon pollution is CO2, and that’s really not a pollutant; that’s a plant food, and it doesn’t harm anybody except that it might include temperature increases.” 
Accusations of racism have dogged Sessions's career: Actually, they almost derailed it. In 1986, a Senate committee denied Sessions, then a 39-year-old U.S. attorney in Alabama, a federal judgeship. His former colleagues testified Sessions used the n-word and joked about the Ku Klux Klan, saying he thought they were “okay, until he learned that they smoked marijuana.” 
By the time the testimony was finished, Sessions's “reputation was in tatters,” wrote Isaac Stanley-Becker in The Post this July, on the eve of Sessions delivering a prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention for Trump. 
In 1986, Sessions defended himself against accusations of racism. “I am not the Jeff Sessions my detractors have tried to create,” he told the very same Senate Judiciary Committee he now sits on. “I am not a racist. I am not insensitive to blacks.”
And he told Stanley-Becker this summer: “Racism is totally unacceptable in America. Everybody needs to be treated fairly and objectively.” 
But the Southern Poverty Law Center's Heidi Beirich, who tracks hate speech, said Sessions is guilty of it, and that his mere presence in Trump's inner circle is “a tragedy for American politics.” 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/18/10-things-to-know-about-sen-jeff-sessions-donald-trumps-pick-for-attorney-general/?utm_term=.866a2ba384aa


Putting the Trump brand on Justice:

A black eye, not a blind one

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