U.S. Senate Could Benefit From Less Sophistry

Guest Column
by David Gespass

The headline to Jeff Sessions’ op-ed in the July 13 Birmingham News (no link available on their al.com Website) promised a fair hearing for Sonia Sotomayor. But the article itself raises questions about whether Senator Sessions was prepared to provide one.

He initially claims that, if confirmed, Judge Sotomayor “will have the power to define the meaning of our Constitution,” which is certainly an exaggeration. She would be one of nine justices and only a majority can make such a decision. This is not an unimportant distinction, since the collective decision-making of the Court can only be enhanced if the backgrounds of the justices are diverse.

More to the point, he asserts that it is wrong to expect a judge, because of her life experiences, to have empathy, claiming that showing empathy to one party demonstrates prejudice to another. Sessions is simply wrong if he is claiming that the judges he would support would not show either empathy or prejudice.

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Will we ever get past this?

For Senator Jeff Sessions and the other Republicans to bring race into this is about the most ridiculous and bizarre thing I’ve seen in the history of American political television.

I don’t know what else to say, so I think it’s Yuengling Time, as they say on Facebook…

NYT

On the eve of the big show in Washington, the first Supreme Court nomination hearings of the Obama era, it is interesting to wonder why the New York Times chose to use this photo of Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions without identifying him. That’s the back of Attorney General Eric Holder’s head on the left, along with an unknown aide and Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The photo did not run on a story about the Supreme Court, where Sessions will be in the national limelight this week.

It ran on a story about the new pressure facing President Obama to reverse himself on looking forward, not back (a story we broke back in November), by ramping up investigations into the Bush-era security programs — despite the political risks. Leading Democrats on Sunday demanded investigations of how a highly classified counterterrorism program was kept secret from the Congressional leadership on the orders of Vice President Dick Cheney.

On Fox News Sunday, Feinstein called it a “big problem.” Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, on “This Week” on ABC, agreed that the secrecy “could be illegal” and demanded an inquiry.

Feinstein Suggests CIA Concealment Broke Law

This is too rich. Stay tuned this week…

Republican Jeff Sessions of Alabama, little known to the country, will lead the charge against Obama’s Hispanic nominee, Sonia Sotomayor of New York

Editor’s Note: I would like to thank the Huffington Post investigative fund for partial funding for this story.

by Glynn Wilson

When the Senate Judiciary Committee convenes Monday, July 13 to begin advise and consent hearings on President Barack Obama’s first nominee to the United States Supreme Court, potentially the first Hispanic on the court, the American people will learn all there is to know about Sonia Sotomayor, an appeals court judge from New York who will most likely be confirmed to replace Justice David Souter. But they may not know a thing about the senator who is expected to enter the national limelight for the first time as the lead inquisitor in her confirmation, who faces grave political risks for his party if things are mishandled and go wrong.

Senator Jeff Sessions

Jefferson “Jeff” Beauregard Sessions III, the ranking minority Republican on the committee elevated by his colleagues to take the lead in questioning Ms. Sotomayor, is an Old South senator with an Old South name from the Deep South state of Alabama. He is an arch-conservative with a voting record ranked in the top five most conservative in the Senate by the National Review. He has voted consistently with a majority of his Republican colleagues 93 percent of the time, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Sessions has already indicated he will want to question Ms. Sotomayor on whether her empathy as a Hispanic from her time on the board of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund will translate into favoritism or “activism” for certain groups. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich started that fight when he was quoted from a Twitter Tweet calling her a racist. Sessions will have to tread a fine line on the race issue since he was turned down for a federal judgeship in 1986 for making racist remarks himself — by the very Senate committee he now leads on the minority side. He called the NAACP and the ACLU “un-American,” and he said the Ku Klux Klan boys were all right with him — until he found out they were “pot smokers,” according to testimony from his failed confirmation-hearing transcript.

That story will be told time and again over the next few days by the nation’s top newspapers, including the New York Times, on cable news and blogs all over the country. But it may not be the most important thing people need to know about the senator who is sitting in judgment on who will be allowed to serve on the nation’s highest court to shape the future of American law for a generation.

What they need to know is that Mr. Sessions has been on a crusade on the side of corporate America and against the rights of workers and juries for many years.

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Will the Republicans really fight Obama’s Supreme Court pick?

Or in the end, will they just play games to raise money and throw red meat to the base?

Most of the real experts say Sotomayor will most likely be confirmed. But there will always be wrinkles, or rumors of wrinkles…

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge, according to AP.

The talking heads are all a Twitter about this, but is it a lot of hot air about nothing?

Meanwhile, the rumor mill is alive and spewing down Montgomery way with this tidbit.

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