On Tuesday morning attorney general-designate Jeff Sessions will become the first Trump nominee to undergo a Senate confirmation hearing. It could be rough.
Democrats have spent weeks noting that Sessions — their colleague in the Senate for the last 20 years — was denied a federal judgeship in 1986 over charges he was “racially insensitive.” The outside groups and journalists that support Democrats have been less tactful; just Google “Sessions” and “racist.”
But the key questions in confirming Sessions are not about what happened, or didn’t happen, in the 1980s. They are about what Sessions would do as attorney general. Crime, policing, imprisonment, illegal immigration — those and many others are big issues on which the Justice Department has taken sometimes controversial stands under Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch. It’s safe to say an Attorney General Sessions would change course. But how?
Sessions has been careful to say very little in the last few weeks. As a senator and member of the Judiciary Committee, he has been through a lot of confirmation battles, some of them quite ugly. No reason to make any untoward statements or step on any toes before the hearing begins.
But a look at Sessions’s record, and talks with people who know him, have worked with him, and are familiar with his approach to issues, can give us a picture of Sessions’s priorities if he is confirmed.
Start with the broad issue of crime. The Sessions people realize and appreciate the remarkable fall in crime in the last 25 years. They don’t argue that crime is as bad or worse today than it was back then. But they are concerned that the historic drop in crime might be over, and crime is on the rise again.
“After two years of decline, the estimated number of violent crimes in the nation increased 3.9 percent in 2015 when compared with 2014 data,” the FBI reported last September when it released its annual report, Crime in the United States. That worked out to an increase in the violent crime rate — that is, violent crimes per 100,000 Americans — of 3.1 percent.
Although property crimes decreased, the increase in violent offenses causes concern among the Sessions people. They are particularly concerned about gun crimes. “The president has presided over a stunning drop in the prosecution of gun crimes,” Sessions said in January 2016. “The proven method for saving the lives of innocent Americans is to arrest, prosecute, convict and jail criminal offenders, especially armed career criminals illegally using guns. This is the way to reduce gun violence.” To that end, the Sessions people believe the next attorney general should make clear to state and local law enforcement that the Justice Department is seriously interested in prosecuting gun offenses.
Adding to that concern is the worry that the Obama administration has been releasing too many people, too quickly, from federal prison. The Bureau of Prisons reported that the federal prison population, which had been increasing for 34 years and hit nearly 220,000 in 2013, declined by 5,149 in fiscal year 2014, by 8,426 in FY 2015, and by 13,553 in FY 2016. Another drop is predicted in FY 2017.
Conservatives have often laughed about stories that appeared in the New York Times to the effect that the crime rate was going down even though the number of people in prison had increased. While Times’ authors seemed baffled by those two developments, it all seemed perfectly logical to conservatives. Now, though, the crime rate is going up, while the number of people in federal prison is going down. That, too, makes perfect sense to conservatives — and it is a cause of concern.
“The wise approach is to slow down and evaluate the trends before accelerating prison population decline,” Sessions wrote last April.
Another area in which Sessions would likely make changes is the federal approach to local policing. There’s no doubt many law enforcement organizations around the country view the Obama administration as anti-police. When there were outbreaks of disorder in Ferguson, Missouri and other places during Obama’s time in office, it seemed to many in law enforcement that the president took the side of the forces of disorder.
Indeed, the Holder/Lynch Justice Department has cracked down on police departments across the country; at this moment around 20 cities are under Justice Department consent decrees, meaning they have to institute changes that satisfy Washington or face tough federal action.
Sessions is not a fan of such tactics. “One of the most dangerous, and rarely discussed, exercises of raw power is the issuance of expansive court decrees,” Sessions wrote in 2008. “Consent decrees have a profound effect on our legal system as they constitute an end-run around the democratic process.”
Given that stand, it is perhaps no surprise that law enforcement organizations around the country were delighted when Sessions was nominated for attorney general. The Fraternal Order of Police, the National Sheriffs’ Association, the International Union of Police Associations, the Major Cities Chiefs Association, the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys, the National District Attorneys Association and more have all endorsed Sessions.
The people familiar with Sessions are also concerned about a loss of energy in the war on drugs. Not only are anti-drug messages less pervasive than in, say, the Reagan years, but Obama’s time in office has seen a lessening of punishments for drug offenders.
“[Federal] life sentences for non-violent drug offenses have fallen five years straight under Obama and are now at the lowest level since 1991,” noted the Clemency Report recently. “Federal judges sentenced just 41 drug offenders to life without parole in 2014, an astonishing 78 percent drop since President Obama took office.”
That is the result of an effort Obama began soon after winning the presidency. Added PolitiFact: “While it took some time to see reductions in the number of drug-related prisoners and the lengths of their sentences, the rules did change. In his later years, Obama turned to his executive powers to commute federal prison sentences at an unprecedented rate.”
Sessions has taken a lot of flak for it — he’s been the subject of recent articles like the Washington Post’s “Jeff Sessions’s ridiculous anti-drug crusade” — but he wants to reverse the Obama trend toward more lax drug enforcement. “Drug use is surging, and deaths are occurring, and in my opinion it’s going to get worse,” Sessions told Lynch last March. He will most certainly try to change that.
On the question of immigration, there’s no question a Sessions Justice Department would be a very different place from the Holder/Lynch years. One of the specific crimes Donald Trump mentioned repeatedly on the campaign stump was the case of Kate Steinle, the young woman murdered in San Francisco in 2015 by a criminal illegal immigrant, convicted of multiple felonies and deported multiple times, who was protected from another deportation by local officials enforcing San Francisco’s “sanctuary city” status.
Trump promised to put an end to cities defying federal immigration law. To do the job, he picked Sessions, who has called sanctuary cities “one of the biggest, most egregious, and most dangerous wrongs now occurring in our immigration system today.”
“Sanctuary cities are together freeing an average of 1,000 criminal aliens a month,” Sessions said in October 2015. “Countless crimes are happening as a result of these never-ending releases: DUIs, assaults, burglaries, drug crimes, gang crimes, and murders.”
Now, some sanctuary cities are gearing up for a fight to protect their ability to defy federal law. Sessions, who as a senator voted for (unsuccessful) measures to crack down on sanctuary cities, last year called on the Obama administration to “immediately take action to withhold significant federal law enforcement funding” for sanctuary cities. It seems likely Sessions would attempt to do that as attorney general, but what other measures he might take are not clear. What is clear, though, is that he would likely exert significant pressure on defiant cities to observe federal law.
There are many other areas that the Justice Department covers — terrorism, civil rights, business and securities fraud, cyber crime, and still more — that will require Sessions’ attention, if he is confirmed. And finally, beyond those, there is the question of what role an attorney general should play in making sure his boss, the president, follows the law like everyone else.
Sessions has worked for, or with, or overseen the Justice Department for 40 years. He has watched a number of attorneys general do their job. Recalls one associate: “What he used to tell me, when we looked at a Janet Reno or an Alberto Gonzales, was, ‘If you want to be Attorney General of the United States, you need to have the backbone to walk into the Oval Office, pound your fist on the desk and say, ‘Mr. President, you can’t do that,’ if what he proposes to do is against the law. And if you don’t have that backbone, you don’t need to be Attorney General of the United States.'”
