Democratic lawmakers who will testify against Sen. Jeff Sessions during his confirmation hearings for attorney general are playing politics and “posturing,” a spokeswoman for the Alabama Republican said Tuesday.
Sarah Isgur Flores told CNN that Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus planning to speak against Sessions will be making false allegations of racism on Tuesday.
“Some of that is a little bit of posturing, Tim Scott (a black Republican senator from South Carolina) has endorsed him,” she said. “Politics is politics, but we feel very confident in what we’re going to present about Sen. Sessions’ character and record over the next two days.”
Booker, Lewis and other black lawmakers are expected to focus on Sessions’ history of voting against civil rights reforms and his past history of being declined for a federal judgeship due to allegations of racism. Sessions couldn’t get confirmed as a federal judge in the 1980s due to allegations he called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) “un-American” and other racism charges.
Flores said Sessions will attempt to show those allegations were politically motivated and didn’t reflect his actual record. She said they were untrue in the 1980s and “they remain false today.”
Flores said she expects Sessions to be confirmed with some Democratic votes, and said West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin is at least one person willing to cross the aisle to support him.
He’ll be making the case that his voting record in the Senate doesn’t actually reflect the way he would do the job of attorney general, she said.
“The role of a senator is policymaking, the attorney general enforces the law,” she said when asked if Sessions would try to roll back gay marriage court decisions. “Obergefell is settled law at this point. He’ll enforce laws he voted for and he’ll enforce laws he didn’t vote for.”
She added that past behavior isn’t an indicator of what Sessions will do in the future, and he’ll be a change from the Obama administration.
“I know it sounds surprising because for the last eight years, we haven’t had a Department of Justice who is actually just enforcing the laws as they’re written instead of the way the Department of Justice wishes they were, and has declined to enforce laws they didn’t agree with,” Flores said. “But, that isn’t the role of the Department of Justice.”
