Sen. Jeff Sessions thinks that the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund, where Sonia Sotomayor was a board member from 1980-1992, is "extreme" and "activist." The first thing that comes to mind is that as an advocacy group, of course the PRLDEF is activist. That's the mission of the organization. I'm not sure the word "activist" means what Sessions seems to think it means in this context.
"Extreme" is another story. Why does Sessions think the PRLDEF is "extreme"? Do they use violence? Do they advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government? Do they call people they don't like "murderers" and post their personal information on the Internet just in case a crazy person wants to find them?
No, the PRLDEF fights discrimination in areas like housing, employment, and voting rights. Sessions believes this is "extreme" behavior.
This isn't so much surprising as it is consistent. As Brian Beutler has been reporting, When Sessions was being considered for an appointment to the U.S. District Court in Alabama, it came out in his confirmation hearings that he believed, as a U.S. attorney, that the NAACP and the ACLU were "un-American" and "Communist-inspired" because they were fighting for voting rights for black folks in the South in the 1980s. Sessions had little interest in pursuing civil-rights violations, saying, according to one witness, "'I wish I could decline on all of them.'" It makes sense that civil-rights groups make Sessions uncomfortable -- he called a black attorney working under him a "boy" on a number of occasions, and told him to "'be careful what you say to white folks.'" Hard to get away with talking to people like that these days, at least if you have a government job.
At the time Sessions didn't think the KKK was such a terrible group. He was overheard by several employees saying, that he "'used to think they [the Klan] were 'OK' until he found out some of them were 'pot smokers.'" The marijuana was the dealbreaker, not the violence or the white supremacy. While Sessions was complaining about his responsibility as a U.S. attorney to preserve the civil rights of minorities, Sonia Sotomayor was on the board of an organization dedicated to preserving them. That, to Sessions, is "extreme."
Session's views on people of color fighting to preserve their rights doesn't seem to have changed much from the time he was a U.S. attorney. But I'm sort of confused as to why the GOP believes someone with Sessions' record should carry the GOP's banner on this issue.
-- A. Serwer
