Senator Jeff Sessions Makes Opening Statement
July 13th, 2009Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama issued an opening statement this morning in the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Sonia Sotomayor that is so misleading it requires serious analysis. Here are a few of the highlights with explanatory remarks.
“This hearing is important because I believe our legal system is at a dangerous crossroads,” Sessions said, a view he must share alone, since I don’t know anyone else who believes that.
“Down one path is the traditional American legal system, so admired around the world, where judges impartially apply the law to the facts without regard to their own personal views. Indeed, our legal system is based on a firm belief in an ordered universe and objective truth. The trial is the process by which the impartial and wise judge guides us to the truth.
“Down the other path lies a ‘Brave New World’ where words have no true meaning and judges are free to decide what facts they choose to see. In this world, a judge is free to push his or her own political and social agenda. I reject this view.”
On the face of it, this is a ridiculous analysis of politics and the law in America’s system of three branches of government. Sessions seems to define objectivity the same way Fox News defines it, as Fair and Balanced — as long as it is conservative and Republicans agree with it. He knows nothing of “objective truth,” only he thinks his views should be the views of mainstream America. In the Bush era, they sort of had that going on, thanks to Karl Rove’s spin. But it’s not true anymore…
The reason we have nine justices on the Supreme Court and advice and consent hearings to confirm or deny them a lifetime appointment on the court is because a person’s background and political views matter. Sessions seems to want the nation’s highest court to defer to Congress and state legislatures for all their power, which is a standard that would allow mob rule in America. If that standard was followed, this nation would still probably have slavery, or at least broad discrimination against persons of color, for example. We would probably not have free speech rights anymore, or Fourth Amendment rights against illegal search and seizure — if left to elected politicians in the executive and legislative branches.
Majority rule is not the end all be all of American democracy. The high court, removed as far as possible from politics, has at times in our history had to rule against the majority for justice to be served.
“I will not vote for — no senator should vote for — an individual nominated by any President who believes it is acceptable for a judge to allow their own personal background, gender, prejudices, or sympathies to sway their decision in favor of, or against, parties before the court. In my view, such a philosophy is disqualifying,” Sessions said. “Such an approach to judging means that the umpire calling the game is not neutral, but instead feels empowered to favor one team over the other.
“Call it empathy, call it prejudice, or call it sympathy, but whatever it is, it is not law. In truth it is more akin to politics. And politics has no place in the courtroom. That is, of course, the logical flaw in the ‘empathy standard.’ Empathy for one party is always prejudice against another.”
Sessions should know all about prejudice, since his entire argument is based on his prejudices. Look at the issues he chose to highlight.
“Judge Sotomayor, we will inquire into how your philosophy, which allows subjectivity into the courtroom, affects your rulings on issues like:
Abortion, where an organization in which you were an active leader argued that the Constitution requires that taxpayer money be used for abortions;
Gun control, where you recently ruled that it is “settled law” that the Second Amendment does not prevent a city or state from barring gun ownership;
Private property, where you have already ruled that the government could take property from one pharmacy developer and give it to another; and
Capital punishment, where you personally signed a statement opposing the reinstatement of the death penalty because of the ‘inhuman[e] psychological burden’ it places on the offender and his or her family.
Sessions is among the radical right in this country who are desperate for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, the ruling that upholds a woman’s right to choose an abortion to end an unwanted pregnancy. So he objects to Sotomayor’s views on abortion, not her clear-headed rulings in keeping with established court precedent on that issue.
Sessions is against gun control, so he is looking for a way to vote against any judge who disagrees with his political views on that issue.
Sessions is for capital punishment, so he does not want any judges on the Supreme Court who disagree with him on that issue.
Sessions is also a radical-right nut on private property rights, who would protect the rich and powerful against any government intrusion, especially on environmental issues. His mention of the pharmacy case is a diversion. He doesn’t believe the federal government has the right to regulate private property even when it is for the good of the public welfare to do so.
Sessions, we suspect, never paid attention to the prime directives of the show Star Trek: The interests of the many outway the interests of the one.
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July 13th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Wise up. Alabama! Impeach the smarmy little creep. He has been wrong about everything since the start of the Bush/Cheney cabal. Get rid of the dude.
July 13th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Of course, the hypocrisy here is that neoconservatives both in the previous administration and on the federal courts have done precisely what Sessions condemns in many instances, and that is to make policy, or new law, from whole cloth.
Inevitably, government reflects the culture of society. Our culture today is one of factional warfare, far removed from the ideals of the Iroquoian Confederacy — which Franklin cited more than once as the ideal to which the newly-minted United States should aspire.
Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings will confirm, if nothing else, that nothing has changed in this regard, except that the Democrats now hold the high ground, with more guns, than the Republicans.
Whether, all things considered, Judge Sotomayor is a good choice for the Supreme Court will be obscured by partisan posing and positioning, and likely not just be Sessions but some of the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee as well.
The confirmation process is just another scene in the shameful Byzantine melodrama that plays daily on Capitol Hill. And, the more I listen to President Obama, the more convinced I am that he is one of the few political leaders in DC, Democrat or Republican, who understand what’s fundamentally wrong.
Let’s hope the president stays the course and doesn’t get burned out by the Washington insanity.
July 13th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Rowland: Alabama could have voted Sessions out in 2008, but his opposition was weak. There are many Democrats in Alabama who think Artur Davis should have run against him. Instead, he decided to abdicate his elected Congressional seat to run for governor.
July 13th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
Yana:
Oh, I don’t know. I do know some people are not interested in this, but to me it’s the biggest show around. I just find the coverage limited to the very biases Sessions raises when talking about judges. If politics is the art of war by other means, this is the game that drives the American future.
Right now, at least, the right side (not the political right) is winning on many fronts.
Later today, if times allows, I will address this in a specific post. But for now, look on the news page to see the other big stories going on, especially torture, spying and justice. We are making progress in getting the Obama administration to look back, not just forward : )
July 13th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
PS for Rowland – Senators can be expelled by the whole Senate for cause (it usually takes a felony to do that), but that’s the only way to get rid of them other than untimely death in office or defeat at the polls. They can, of course, resign.
There is no recall mechanism for federal officials. When some Western state tried to apply recall to members of Congress and Senators, the federal courts ruled that the US Constitution defines how elections for federal officials work and that doesn’t include recall. So, Californians can recall state officials, for instance, but not members of their congressional delegation. The same thing happened with term limits when Ohio tried to apply it to Congress.
A final note: it is sometimes very disheartening to see people with whom there is disagreement referred to on these pages with personally derogatory appellations, e.g, “smarmy little creep.”
I am citing the one by Rowland, not because of any personal animosity toward him, but because his is the most recent example. There have been dozens of examples of this here over recent months, and heaven knows how many zillions all over the internet, both from the left and from the right at their favorite enemies.
“Ad hominem” comments are by nature weak arguments and add nothing of substance to discussion of the issue at hand.
Now that I’ve offended all, I will leap from my soapbox and sit quietly on the sideline.
July 13th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
People are entitled to their opinions in the comments section, but it happens WAY less here than the anonymous blogs and al.com. Sometimes it just adds color.
I admit, I have referred to Sessions as our “shrimp” of a senator before, but I stand by that remark as an apt literary description, not just a personal attack.
I will freely admit that I do it because, even though I’m a short guy myself and sometimes object to short jokes, Sessions is one of the few politicians I can and have personally looked down upon. He’s like 5-feet tall : )
Of course one of my best friends was Spider Martin, who only stood 5-feet and 3/4-inches tall. I don’t ever recall calling him a shrimp, but maybe that’s because we agreed on just about everything when it came to politics : )
Sessions is also an ideological, intellectual shrimp … a bottom feeder!
July 13th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Glynn – point well taken. Soft “ad hominem” is actually the basis for comedy and humor, so to a point it’s OK by me.
Again, I didn’t single out Rowland but the description he gave, which I thought went a little too far beyond soft to hard.
My underlying campaign at this point, and not just here, is to ask people to focus not only on the issues but on the underlying cultural phenomena that have created what Trudeau characterized, in a long-ago Doonesbury, as a “Darwinian nightmare of competing special interest groups.”
Our culture does not value – at least, not very much – civility and consensus-building. Most leaders of both major parties and certainly most other large institutions, public and private, for-profit and non-profit, conduct themselves as if they were at war.
Language is a reflection of that. Words, although they are not things, can and often do prompt actions, emotions, and hardened hearts and minds. In my opinion, a necessary step toward changing that is changing the way we talk to each other. One more reason I constantly refer to the Iroquois confederation, where long consideration was given by speakers to the words they would use before speaking at council or otherwise in public.
One predictable outcome of the Sotomayor hearings is that, given our political system still operates on the warfare principle, with accompanying belligerent language, Jeff Sessions will not change his mind about anything. At least, I don’t believe he will.
But if he were sitting in an Iroquois council meeting circa 1750, that would have been one of the options on his mind as he listened to the opinions of other speakers. They actually did deliberate, something that, thanks to Iroquoian-process-admirer Franklin, it was envisioned the Senate would do.
This change in the way we do things isn’t just a matter of “Wouldn’t it be nice,” but a matter of fundamental importance for the future.
July 13th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
“Sessions has squandered a national opportunity to reveal a magnanimous, de-segregated self. ”
Obviously he is not a memeber of the RSCSFM.
July 13th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
maybe he’ll get a few more chances to make a fool of himself…like Sen AIG Baucus! Give them enuff rope and they’ll gladly hang themselves.
William in Montana
July 13th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
Artur Davis in place of Sessions? Never They’re two peas on a pod, and I don’t trust either of them.
Tom, Dick or Jane should not be allowed to just say, Hey, I think I’ll run for blah, blah, blah and then have the party jump on their bandwagons with money to support their whim. There should be huge vetting of anybody who runs and if they are not electible, then they should not be allowed on the ticket. After all it’s OUR contributions that go into appeasing the egos of these egotistical prima donnas.
July 13th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
I meant then, not now…
July 13th, 2009 at 10:32 pm
Artur DAvis and Jeff Sessions referred to as “two peas in a pot”. Artur Davis is as different from Sessions as night and day. And how does Ms. Davis suggest political parties vet their candidates? I thought that was what primaries involving a vote of the people did. And who decides whether a candidate is “not electable”? As long as a political party uses primaries to select its candidates, I thought that decision was made by the voters. Unless we want to go back to the old ways of having a political party select their candidates by a handful of party officials.
I choose to let the people decide and pray that the next time Sessions runs the Democrats will be able to recruit a strong candidate against him. His opening statement today was an embarrassment to the state, and to the body politic.
July 14th, 2009 at 6:20 am
Today I ran across a small banner that I used to print on envelopes when I was paying my bills by mail. It read: Buch/Cheney….In your guts you know they’re nuts.
For sure this applies equally to Jeff Sessions. I listened to part of his rant and wanted to reach through the TV screen and punch him in the mouth to shut him up. What a hypocrite!
He doesn’t have a problem with Roberts pushing his (and Sessions) political views but heaven help us if Ms. Sotomayer should use her own brain to decide any legal issue.
ALABAMA………….FOR THE GOOD OF THE COUNTRY PLEASE RID YOURSELF OF THIS CRETIN!
July 14th, 2009 at 7:29 am
Sessions was just on CNN saying the same old BS. He said her confirmation depends on what happens today…
July 14th, 2009 at 8:19 am
While listening to Washington Journal this morning I heard the list of cases that Sessions thought were mistakenly ruled. Sessions would prefer to throw out Stare Decisis since 1935, obviously. This brings into question whether he values our form of government, since he has expressed his views that one-third of it has performed illegitimately.
Is this guy for real? How did he make it through law school with such a view of our judicial system? I find it shocking that his consituency gave him enough votes to be in office, but perhaps that says something about the misunderstanding the voting public in Alabama has about the impact of these rulings.
July 14th, 2009 at 8:42 am
Sessions and Sotomayor just had the critical exchange, I suspect, and Sessions was stymied. Interesting to watch the flow on Facebook on this between Media Matters for America and the TPMMuckraker.
Sessions is out of the mainstream, but the press in Alabama has never asked one critical question or printed one discouraging word about the guy, so what do you expect?
Even my former dean at Alabama told me recently Sessions is “popular.” I don’t buy it. The people here know nothing, unless they are reading national newspapers and the best of the Web sites online. And by best, I don’t mean al.com…
July 14th, 2009 at 9:51 am
This just in from Don Siegelman:
The grandfather of political prejudice in Alabama
At least one Republican on the Senate Judiciary is playing hard ball with President Obama’s nominations. The new Minority leader on the Senate Judiciary Committee is Alabama’s Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. I ask ” What moral ground gives Senator Sessions the right to berate Sotomayor because she believes her background as a minority makes her even more qualified to serve on the Supreme Court”. Sessions is the man who once said “I thought the Klu Klux Klan was a pretty good group of guys until I heard they smoked pot.” Jeff Beauregard Sessions, has always been on the wrong side of Justice.
Jeff Sessions used his position as U.S. Attorney to go after Alabama Black political activists to suppress Black voter turnout. The FBI under Sessions direction rounded up Black activists, loaded them on a bus with a state trooper escort, had them finger printed, photographed and made to give a hand writing sample. Sessions put a retired school teacher, Julia Wilder, in Alabama’s only maximum security prison for women at the age of 72 because she went door to door encouraging her neighbors to vote and if they were going to be out of town, she arranged for them to get an absentee ballot!
That’s the same Jeff Sessions who is now a road block to President Obama’s choice for the U. S. Supreme Court.
Democrats and moderate Republicans must stand up to Sessions and say:
“Get out of President Obama’s way and let him fulfill his commitment of change.”
It’s time to remove the political road blocks to change.
Don Siegelman,
Governor of Alabama 1999-2003
July 14th, 2009 at 10:48 am
Saw part of the exchange this morning. Sessions appeared to ignore Sotomayor’s straightforward commitment to make decisions based on the law, and also ignored her compelling explanations of how remarks she had made, particularly the “wise Latina” comment, had been taken out of context.
Sessions and Grassley are just crushing sour grapes. Republicans lost control of the Senate, and the White House, last year because a majority of Americans who voted thought it was time for change. What kind of change, and how much, can be interpreted widely, but one thing is for sure: Barack Obama was elected president and is thereby entitled to nominate Supreme Court justices.
While the Constitution does not mandate that the Senate must approve a presidential nominee, it seems clear that with Democrats in the majority, both on the judiciary committee and the full Senate, Sotomayor will be confirmed. She is a talented, accomplished jurist and will be a good Supreme Court justice.
Let’s throw out those sour grapes and move on now that Sessions and Grassley have had their opportunity to stomp around on them on national television.
July 14th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
The talking heads loved Lindsey Graham of South Carolina’s questioning. I thought he was about as bad as Sessions, and just trying to make nice with Rush Limbaugh.
Confirmation seems almost for sure now, though, since even he said me might vote for her.
Wish I felt more like writing about this. An indomitable pain in the stomach…
July 14th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
A final note for me in this lengthy series.
First, it’s good to see Don Siegelman is posting here, about a judicial issue that does not immediately concern him, when, as they say, he’s got his own fish to fry. Good show, Don and you will be vindicated, sooner or later.
Second, a great comment heard on NPR this afternoon: The Republicans, led by Sessions of course, focused on what Sotomayor said in speeches given in various public forums.
The Democrats, led by Schumer, instead focused on her rather middle-of-the-road judicial record, i.e., her actual decisions on the bench.
Guess which group made more sense?
July 14th, 2009 at 11:42 pm
Well, the Democrats are going to be nice, and the Republicans are going to try to raise a stink. That’s the way it is. Bottom line: The GOP don’t have the votes no more…