Jeff Sessions began his statement by saying he hoped the confirmation hearings would be "the best we've ever had," before launching into a laundry list of terms being used by conservative activists to discredit Sonia Sotomayor: "bias," "prejudice," racial quotas. Sessions touched on every right-wing bugaboo from the court, from the influence of foreign law and the court "created a right for terrorists captured on a foreign battlefield to sue the United States in our own country" to property rights. Sessions fretted that the court would be "corrupted" by Obama's view that "the depth and breath of one's empathy" is an important quality for a judge.
Most startling however, was that despite Sessions expressed wish that the hearings be "respectful," he immediately began suggesting that Sotomayor was "prejudiced" and biased, saying that he could not vote for a nominee who would "allow their personal background, gender preferences or sympathies to sway" their rulings, and then began to argue that Sotomayor does exactly that, in defiance of empirical evidence to the contrary. Sessions briefly acknowledged that Sotomayor's record hardly reflects his characterization, but argued that Sotomayor's record was irrelevant because Ruth Bader Ginsburg has become one of the "most activist" nominees in the court history (In fact, the most activist judge on the court in terms of overturning precedent is Antonin Scalia, followed closely by Clarence Thomas, presumably the very model of judges Sessions considers "neutral umpires".)
Remarkably, Sessions, who called the ACLU and the NAACP "communist-inspired" as an Alabama District Attorney in the 1980s, called the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund (which he had previously referred to as "radical") a "fine organization" before suggesting that Sotomayor's ruling in the Ricci case was due to Sotomayor's work for the PRLDEF. Sessions declared that "Judge Sotomayor's empathy towards one group of firefighters resulted in prejudice towards another".
In other words, Sessions spent his opening statement calling Judge Sotomayor a racist. That's pretty rich coming from a man who once thought white civil rights lawyers were "race traitors."
-- A. Serwer
