The Trump Effect: Jeff Sessions, in the wake of a 40 year racist career, becomes the Attorney General

Jeff Sessions, 1986

1986 was a good year to be a Republican. Reagan had just won re-election in 1984 with a sweeping and never before or since matched, 525 electoral votes, and carrying 49 out of 50 states. Reagan's down home rhetoric for prayer in schools, against environmental protection, against safety nets, against the use of illegal drugs, against the poor and marginalized had struck a chord with the American people.

He had just signed the Immigration Control and Reform Act, making it amongst other things, illegal to knowingly hire illegal immigrants, but also granted amnesty to 3 million undocumented Americans.

And in a quiet Judiciary Committee, a young Jeff Sessions, then a 39 year old lawyer from Alabama, stood ready to defend his appointment to a federal judgeship by the wildly popular President.

The committee heard that he used racist rhetoric regularly, including the 'n-word' to describe black colleagues. They heard that he thought the Ku Klux Klan weren't so bad (at least until he found out the local chapter imbibed in marijuana, what Sessions found to be their compelling character flaw.) They heard his pointed opposition to civil rights groups, including the NAACP.

from the New York Times

The committee returned their verdict, 10-8, against the appointment.

30 years later, the man a group of Reagan-era senators deemed too racist to be a judge, will now sit as the most powerful prosecutor in the United States of America.

As Attorney General of Alabama, Sessions worked to defund the Gay-Straight Alliances in his state universities. The US District Court found against him and his clear violation of the 1st Amendment in 1996. He voted against the Matthew Shepherd Act, voted against the repealing of DOMA, and tried in both 2004 and 2006 to prohibit equal marriage rights as a Constitutional Amendment.

Sessions has been a vocal opponent of any immigration reform that provides a path to amnesty for any undocumented immigrant, including the DREAM Act, which provides temporary protections to young people who came to the United States as children, even, as infants.

More recently, in the wake of the infamous 'Grab her by the pussy' recording, Sessions defiantly insisted to reporter that it was not, in fact, sexual assault, to touch a woman's genitals without her permission. (For the record, Sessions is entirely wrong on this.) Later he tried to back track, claiming he was misrepresented in the heat of a chaotic campaign environment.

In January 2017, Loretta Lynch will leave the position of attorney general, and her office, which has made it a mandate to root out incidences of race based criminality, and leave it in the hands of a man who is on record as using contemptible language about black men, opposing protections for the entirety of the LGBTQ community, opposing organizations interested in protecting human rights, opposing non-racist legislation to improve America's immigrant situation.