Doesn’t Sound Like A Racist: Jeff Sessions Desegregated Schools, Got Death Penalty For KKK Head

From the Weekly Standard:

Now that Jeff Sessions is Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, you’re going to hear a lot of people dig up old accusations that Sessions is a racist. In fact, CNN did so last night. However, between the nature of the accusations and Sessions’s actual record of desegregating schools and taking on the Klan in Alabama, it strains credulity to believe that he is a racist. 

These accusations all center around the bruising judicial nomination process Sessions went through in 1986. Ronald Reagan had tapped Sessions to serve on the federal bench and the Senate judiciary committee ultimately rejected him after they heard testimony that he had supposedly called the ACLU and NAACP “un-American” and “communist-inspired,” as well as made racist remarks. 

The accusations came from Thomas Figures, a black assistant U.S. attorney who worked for Sessions who said Sessions called him “boy” and had made a joke about how he thought the KKK was “O.K. until [he] found out they smoked pot.” Another prosecutor, J. Gerald Hebert, said Sessions had called a white lawyer “a disgrace to his race” for representing black clients.

AND THEN THERE'S THIS:

ARLEN SPECTER SAYS, HIS VOTE AGAINST SESSIONS "REMAINS ONE OF MY BIGGEST REGRETS"

The left is going to make attacking Jeff Sessions the cornerstone of its early resistance to Donald Trump. Elizabeth Warren, a possible presidential contender in 2020, sounded the call almost immediately, asserting a moral imperative to block Sessions’ confirmation. 

The alleged moral imperative is based on stale and, in some cases, disputed claims of mildly racist comments that were alleged 30 years ago when Sessions was denied confirmation for a federal judgeship. Warren stated: 

Thirty years ago, a different Republican Senate rejected Senator Sessions’ nomination to a federal judgeship. In doing so, that Senate affirmed that there can be no compromise with racism; no negotiation with hate. Today, a new Republican Senate must decide whether self-interest and political cowardice will prevent them from once again doing what is right. 

But did the Senate get it right 30 years ago? Arlen Specter, who cast the deciding vote against Sessions, later concluded it did not. Specter, who has never big on confessing error, called his vote a “mistake” that “remains one of my biggest regrets.”