Hmm, maybe liberals can actually rip out the kitchen sink and throw it at Jeff Sessions.
Because they’ve thrown everything else at him that they can think of. So let’s sort through the midden of already tossed objects as Senate confirmation hearings proceed for the Alabama Republican whom Donald J. Trump has appointed as attorney general.
Biggest object thrown: The puffed-up-with-self-
Booker is said to be seeking his party’s presidential nomination in 2020, and he clearly wanted to make a big splash. He did. The kind that accompanies a very large stone sinking to the bottom of the lake.
Littlest object thrown: That would be Sessions’s tiny half-Chinese granddaughter, who sat on his lap during part of the hearing. MTV News writer Ira Madison III spit out this (since deleted) tobacco plug of sarcasm on Twitter: Sessions, sir, kindly return this Asian baby to the Toys “R” Us you stole her from.” Other tweeters promptly joined in: “lol loving jeff sessions’ ‘how can i possibly be a racist when i’m holding this nonwhite baby’ moment” and “Notice how Sessions made a big show of kissing a baby before being sworn in.”
Most disingenuous object: New York Times magazine writer Emily Bazelon’s article about Sessions’s prosecution for voter fraud—ultimately unsuccessful—of three African-Americans in 1985 when he was U.S. Attorney for western Alabama. Bazelon neglected to mention that the victims of the alleged fraud were other African-Americans who went to the polls to vote and discovered that absentee ballots marked with their names had already been filed.
Oldest object: That 1986 letter by the late Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King Jr., written when Sessions, as an appointee of Ronald Reagan, was under consideration by a Democrat-controlled Senate for a federal judgeship. Corretta King, implicitly referring to that 1985 voter-fraud case, wrote that Sessions had “used the awesome powers of his office in a shabby attempt to intimidate and frighten elderly black voters. . . . The irony of Mr. Sessions’ nomination is that, if confirmed, he will be given a life tenure for doing with a federal prosecution what the local sheriffs accomplished twenty years ago with clubs and cattle prods.” The letter, which helped torpedo Sessions’s hopes for a judgeship back then, had been lost for years—until the Washington Post reprinted its text on the opening day of Session’s attorney-general confirmation hearing.
Still—it may not be too late for liberals. There must a kitchen sink with a few already-loosened screws somewhere in the Democratic senators’ offices.
