Senate Democrats managed to broker a deal that pushed through a 19 of President Barack Obama's judicial nominees, while leaving the most promising progressives, like Goodwin Liu, in limbo. Senator Jeff Sessions would prefer none of Obama's nominees ever be confirmed because they have "ACLU DNA," Ryan Reilly reports:
"I'm sure that less than one percent of the lawyers in America are members of the ACLU," Sessions said. "It seems if you have the ACLU DNA, you get a pretty good leg up to being nominated by this president."
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"It's clear that the president, our president, an activist -- a community activist, a liberal progressive as his friends have described him, and former law professor, is attempting to pack the courts who share his views and who will promote his vision of what, as he has said about judges, what America should be," Sessions said.
"I do believe the administration needs to understand that this is going to be a more contentious matter if we keep seeing the ACLU chromosome as part of this process," Sessions said.
Many conservatives have a misplaced sense of hostility towards the ACLU. But Sessions in particular may hate the ACLU because his 1986 nomination to be a federal judge was derailed by testimony that he had referred to the ACLU and the NAACP as "communist-inspired" and complained that they were "trying to force civil rights down the throats of people who were trying to put problems behind them." In case there's any confusion, those trying to "put problems behind them" were white southerners like Sessions, not black people who had been living under Jim Crow segregation just twenty years earlier.
Sessions also admitted calling a white civil rights lawyer a "disgrace to his race," and that he thought the KKK were "okay" until he found out they were "pot smokers." Apparently the violence and terrorism didn't bother him, but getting stoned was where he drew the line.
The country would be a better place if judges with "ACLU DNA" were nominated to the bench since the ACLU has displayed a pretty admirable commitment to the rule of law regardless of which party is in power. It sounds to me like Sessions hates the ACLU for all the reasons someone associated with the ACLU would make a good judge.
