THE US ATTORNEY GENERAL IS TAKING US BACK TO THE CIVIL WAR ERA

…The Southerner that is mentally still living in the old South, AG Jeff Sessions

 

If we have 4 or more years under Sessions as the AG, we will have wiped out years of progress.

 

I was really disgusted when I saw the new video of the Attorney General Jeff Sessions saying the following,   “I really am amazed that a single judge out of 700, sitting on an island in the Pacific, can issue an order that stops the president of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power.”

 

Yet the man whose job is to be the top lawyer for all of us Americans said this about a federal judge, doing his job in Hawaii, as the judge blocked President Trump’s travel ban.

 

And by the way, FYI: this judge was not the only judge out of 700 federal US judges that supported this decision against the travel ban that was unconstitutional by being based on ethnicity and religion.

 

The op-ed writer E.J. Dionne Jr. wrote the following about what the AG has done: “Imagine if I began a column about Attorney General Jeff Sessions this way: ‘I really am amazed that an attorney general who hails from a former Confederate state in the Deep South can issue a series of orders wrecking efforts to reform police practices, cutting back on voting rights and restarting the war on drugs.’…that knock on the 'land of cotton' would leave my inbox bulging with rebukes to bigotry against Dixie, and I’d probably get many YouTube links to Lynyrd Skynyrd singing “Sweet Home Alabama.”

 

I am no fan of the conservative radio talk-show host, Mark Levin, but I agree with him when he said, “Hawaii is a state like every other and has been in the union for 58 years,” and as Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HA) had pointed out.: “Are newer states supposed to be inferior to older ones?”

 

Donald Trump and his administration have the habit of trying to discredit any judge who rules against it. (Remember how Trump hated the Indiana Judge that was of Hispanic descent that Trump called a “hater” because he had ruled against Trump in the Trump University class action  law suit?)  It’s just the basic stuff of today’s autocratic regimes.

 

Of course, members of the executive branch have every right to criticize and appeal lower-court decisions.  But what Sessions suggested is that Derrick Watson, the federal judge in question, somehow lost his right to rule just because of where his court is located.

 

It is interesting that for the dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, Hawaii has been a special demonized place in conservative thinking.  That is because many of those on the right, once they had to concede that the former president Obama was actually born there and not in Kenya, they still wanted to hold on to the idea that Obama came into the world from a location that was…….different.

 

I am sure that AG Sessions picked up his anti-Hawaii cues from the right-wing media, which recently reported that Obama had “unexpectedly flown alone to Hawaii on March 13, two days before Judge Watson issued his ruling”.  Also that Watson had “just happened to go to Harvard Law School with the former president”.

 

The conservativetreehouse.com blog asked: “Coincidences? Or did President Obama travel to Hawaii to initiate, facilitate, or participate in the decision by Judge Watson?”

 

Of course, Rush Limbaugh initially got the story out there and then insisted that he wouldn’t traffic in speculation. “I want to mention also Barack Obama has been in Hawaii the past few days,” he said, but added, “I don’t know if Obama met with the judge.”  But of course, that doesn’t matter.  I’m sure his listeners never heard Limbaugh’s last comment.

 

The amazing and disgusting part of all this is that AG Sessions has also started changing the Justice Department’s stance on voting rights cases.  He is moving away from minority plaintiffs and is in favor of states that pass discriminatory measures such as strict voter ID laws restricting access to the ballot.  (Typical Republican, Jim Crow laws.  Remember, the GOP wins when fewer people vote!)  The new Justice Department stance did not stop US District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos from declaring earlier this month that the Texas’s strict voter ID law “was passed with a discriminatory purpose.”

 

But it doesn’t stop there.

 

Sessions also ordered department officials to review reform agreements between its civil rights division and troubled police forces nationwide.  This refers to an Obama-era initiative aimed at restoring community confidence in the police after a series of shootings of unarmed black men.

 

Jonathan Smith, executive director of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, called the move “terrifying”.  But in a USA Today op-ed, Sessions had invoked classic law-and-order rhetoric, saying he would “not sign consent decrees that will cost more lives by handcuffing the police instead of the criminals.”  So, it's OK to violate the civil rights of those unarmed blacks.

 

The Washington Post reported; “Sessions is bringing back the old war on drugs, thus stopping in its tracks, a once-promising criminal justice reform movement of conservatives, liberals and libertarians concerned with over-incarceration, particularly in African American communities.”

 

You don’t have to live on an island to worry about what Sessions is doing in his old Southern version of justice.

 

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