A Democratic lawmaker is slamming the selection of Sen. Jeff Sessions as President-elect Trump’s attorney general by going so far as to argue the Alabama senator would drag the United States back into the days of rampant racism and suppression of minorities.
In a blistering statement about a fellow lawmaker, Illinois Rep. Luis Gutierrez seemed to use the Republican’s full name — Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III — in an attempt to invoke Confederacy imagery.
“If you have nostalgia for the days when blacks kept quiet, gays were in the closet, immigrants were invisible and women stayed in the kitchen, Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions is your man,” Gutierrez said.
PGT Beauregard was one of the first prominent Confederate generals in the Civil War. Beauregard was in charge of the defense of Charleston, S.C., and ordered the first shots of the war by firing on Fort Sumter in the city’s harbor. He also helped design the Confederate battle flag.
Gutierrez, who has sparred with Sessions over the years on the issue of immigration, argued the Republican has worked in the Senate to try and stop the advancement of minorities in the United States.
“No senator has fought harder against the hopes and aspirations of Latinos, immigrants and people of color than Sen. Sessions,” he said. “He is a staunch opponent of legal immigration and someone who has blocked every effort to improve, modernize and humanize our immigration system, which is two or three decades out-of-date.”
Sessions, in the past, faced accusations of making racist comments — something he denies but that has resurfaced in the wake of his selection by Trump.
In 1986, then-federal prosecutor Sessions was nominated by President Reagan to serve as a federal judge. But his nomination was tanked after he was accused of making sympathetic comments about the Klu Klux Klan, calling the NAACP “un-American” and referring to an African-American man in his office as “boy,” according to testimony at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
Gutierrez said that’s the kind of man Trump is looking for in his administration.
“He ran for the Senate because he was deemed by the Senate Judiciary Committee as too racist to serve as a federal judge,” he said. “He is the kind of person who will set back law enforcement, civil rights, the courts and increase America’s mass incarceration industry and erase 50 years of progress.”
Sessions gave a candid interview to Politico’s Glenn Thrush earlier this year talking about his time growing up in Alabama and noted he campaigned against former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, a segregationist, when he was in college.
“People of my generation knew we needed to move beyond that, the racial division and segregation and unsustainable social relations, that were unfair to millions of people,” Sessions said.
