Democrats in the Senate fought hard, but it is almost inevitable that Jeff Sessions will be our next Attorney General. The Senate Judiciary Committee approved him with an 11-9 vote along party lines. All of the Democrats in the committee voted against him. Next, the entire Senate will vote on Sessions’ confirmation, where he is expected to easily win due to a 52-48 seat GOP majority.
Senator Al Franken (D-Minn) gave a speech against on Jeff Sessions in the Judiciary Committee. Franken focused on voting fraud and Sessions’ rejection from a Federal Judge seat. From the speech:
“Now, the Department of Justice under the attorney general’s leadership and direction is tasked with protecting the right to vote and prosecuting fraud. It seems unusual to me the president-elect would make such a bold claim asserting that a fraud of truly epic proportions had occurred and that he wouldn’t bother to discuss it with the guy he appointed to be the nation’s top cop. That didn’t seem to bother Sen. Sessions. […]”
“When the President of the United States lies about the existence of massive widespread fraud it’s the job of the attorney general to call him out on it. The attorney general has an obligation to tell like it is.”
Sessions wants to get rid of the law prohibiting churches from getting into politics. He once called the NAACP a “Communist” organization. In 1986, he was denied a Federal Judge position because his colleagues testified that Sessions had been using the “n-word” and joking about the KKK.
During his confirmation hearing, Sessions said that non-religious people don’t know the truth. Just a few seconds before, he was saying that the United States is not a theocracy. Then, he was asked if secular people have a claim to the truth. Sessions said he wasn’t sure.
He has condemned “secularists” before in an interview:
“Ultimately, freedom of speech is about ascertaining the truth. And if you don’t believe there’s a truth, you don’t believe in truth, if you’re an utter secularist, then how do we operate this government? How can we form a democracy of the kind I think you and I believe in… I do believe that we are a nation that, without God, there is no truth, and it’s all about power, ideology, advancement, agenda, not doing the public service.”
We just confirmed an Attorney General who wants to make us a theocracy. He dismissed 22.8 percent of the country when he said we have to have God in government. We can’t have a just Attorney General who has such a strong bias. He will not treat non-religious people fairly.
Featured image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.
