Email insights: Civil, Human Rights Coalition strongly opposes Jeff Sessions for AG

The Conference on Civil and Human Rights sounded off on the appointment of Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions as attorney general in a Friday email.

“This nomination is deeply troubling to Americans who care about equal protection under the law,” group president Wade Henderson said in the email. “Throughout his tenure in the Senate, Sen. Sessions has been one of the chamber’s leading antagonists of immigrants and the LGBT community, continuing his long record of obstructing civil rights that began in his tenure as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama.”

Sessions was long thought to be Donald Trump’s top pick for secretary of defense, but the incoming president announced Friday that the third-term Alabama senator would be nominated as attorney general.

Trump also announced Friday that Kansas Republican Rep. Mike Pompeo would be nominated as CIA director.

Henderson said Sessions’ “record of hostility to voting rights as U.S. Attorney is particularly egregious.”

“He called a white voting rights litigator a ‘disgrace to his race,’ retaliated against voting rights advocates by wrongly charging them with crimes, and proclaimed the Voting Rights Act ‘intrusive,’” Henderson said. “He also once declared that the Ku Klux Klan was ‘OK’ but that the National Council of Churches, the NAACP, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were ‘un-American.’”

Henderson closed the email by saying Trump should pick someone else to serve as attorney general or the U.S. Senate should shoot down Sessions’ nomination.