After a high-profile spat with President-elect Trump last year, Gold Star father Khizr Khan has returned to the spotlight to argue against Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions’ nomination to be the next attorney general.
“I am writing to urge you, out of respect for the American values enshrined in the Constitution, not to confirm Sen. Jeff Sessions to be Attorney General of the United States,” Khan wrote in a letter to the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee released Monday by People for the American Way. “I am also well aware of the fact that the Republican Majority of this honorable Committee may confirm Sen. Sessions after an incomplete and less than thorough hearing which will compromise its moral authority in our legislative system.”
Khan, whose son was killed by a suicide bomber, infamously asked Trump if he had ever read the Constitution, and told him that “you have sacrificed nothing” during a speech at the Democratic National Convention last summer.
In response, Trump initiated a back-and-forth with Khan and his wife, and Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson blamed President Obama for the death of Khan’s son, U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan, even though he was killed in 2004 — months before Obama was elected to the Senate.
“People around the world look to our Constitution with envy. They are inspired by its promise of equal protection of the law to everyone – not just people from powerful families, or a favored ethnic group or religious community. I wish to say emphatically that this is about a principle that, like the Constitution, is bigger than politics and partisanship,” Khan wrote in his letter.
Khan noted that the last time Sessions was before the Senate as a nominee, to be a federal judge in 1986, he was rejected.
Sessions “has not demonstrated a greater understanding that the right to vote should transcend partisan interests,” Khan argued, noting Sessions’ criticism of the Voting Rights Act. In addition, the Alabama senator has been critical of the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union, “which indicates he does not understand patriotic dissent or value the role that these organizations play in upholding our constitutional values,” Khan wrote.
Sessions has “defended proposals that would single Muslim immigrants out for discriminatory treatment on the basis of their religious beliefs” — which Khan called “not the American way.”
“My son, U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan, was a living rebuke to such bigotry,” Khan concluded.
