South Carolina senator Tim Scott says he will support his fellow Republican senator, Jeff Sessions, for attorney general. In a statement released late on the eve of Sessions’s confirmation hearing, Scott allowed that while he and the Alabama senator “may not agree on everything”, he would nonetheless vote to confirm President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Justice Department.
“I have gotten to know Jeff over my four years in the Senate, and have found him to be a consistently fair person,” said Scott Tuesday night.
The announcement came just hours after it was announced that New Jersey senator Cory Booker, a Democrat, would testify as a witness against Sessions’s nomination—the first such time a sitting U.S. senator will testify against another senator for an executive confirmation. Scott and Booker are the only two black senators currently serving. In 1986, Sessions (then a U.S. attorney) was nominated for a seat on a federal circuit court, after which he was accused of making racially insensitive remarks by four Justice Department colleagues. Sessions denied these accusations and that he was a racist, but his nomination failed to move forward out of the Senate Judiciary committee.
In his statement, Scott said since Sessions’s nomination, the South Carolina senator has “put a special emphasis on this nomination in terms of doing my own homework and determining the facts from the allegations.” Here’s more:
Scott says he has concluded that “many facts” are “absolutely clear” about Sessions: “Jeff is committed to upholding the Constitution of the United States. He joined multiple desegregation lawsuits while serving as a U.S. Attorney, protecting the civil rights of students seeking equal educational opportunity. He ensured a KKK murderer received the death penalty. He voted for the first black Attorney General of the United States, and championed the effort to award Rosa Parks the Congressional Gold Medal.”
Opponents of Sessions have disputed some of these points in the Republican’s favor. One of the lawyers who accused him of making racially offensive comments, Thomas Figures, has claimed Sessions initially wanted to drop the case of the Ku Klux Klan member who lynched and murdered a black man in Alabama in 1981. But that’s a very different account than that of the local district attorney who worked on the case and says Sessions was instrumental in prosecuting the KKK member and his associate.
