Jeff Sessions Exposes The Soft Bigotry Of Inaction

From Sessions, the comments read as pretty much everything that is wrong with the Trumpist approach to civil rights.

1024px-jeff_sessions_official_portraitJeff Sessions delivered some prepared remarks today, for the Justice Department’s “celebration” of Black History Month. His statement closed with this:

Equal justice must prevail in every corner of this nation. There remains, of course, much to be done. We must also know that real reconciliation goes beyond law. It lives in the heart and the soul — as Lincoln and Dr. King so well knew.

For a normal Attorney General, one who hadn’t been accused of being a Klan-sympathizing racist, the paragraph could be ignored as an empty platitude from a person whose job isn’t to make speeches.

From Sessions, the comments read as pretty much everything that is wrong with the Trumpist approach to civil rights.

First, there’s the rank hypocrisy. You can’t say “There remains, of course, much to be done,” not a day after your office refuses to do anything to help equal justice “prevail.” On Monday, the Sessions Department withdrew the government’s key objection to Texas’s restrictive voter ID law. The Obama administration argued that Texas enacted its law with “discriminatory intent.” Sessions withdrew that argument. His office is not willing to fight Texas over whether its law that unfairly impacted minorities was intended to unfairly impact minorities.

This is no minor legal issue: you might remember the Supreme Court eviscerating the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. Before John Roberts declared racism over in the South, Texas couldn’t change its voting laws without getting preclearance from the federal government. After the decision, you have to show that Texas changed its laws with discriminatory intent to really get them to stop.

On Monday, Sessions refused to fight discrimination. On Tuesday, he stood up there and said “The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were the pivot points. This is where the tide turned.” Sessions nods and smiles towards these landmark laws, but uses his hands to choke the life out of them.

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So he’s a hypocrite. That’s a term that could apply to Trump, every person he’s hired, and nearly every person who voted for him. But there’s a deeper philosophical disconnect between the Sessions Justice Department and the fight for equal justice under the law.

“We must also know that real reconciliation goes beyond law. It lives in the heart and the soul…”

What? YOU’RE A FREAKING LAWYER! When I want hearts and souls changed, I’ll ask a preacher for his thoughts on God’s most strict scrutiny. In the meantime, you worry about the Justice Department going “beyond law” to VIOLATE my due process.

Sessions, and his ilk, act like the legal battles for civil rights have been fought, and won. They pretend that equality under the law has been achieved, and then say that what racism endures exists in the “heart and soul,” thus putting it beyond the reach of the laws of men. Instead of learning from the successes of the past, they use it as an excuse to go no farther. It’s like they’re saying “Blacks can’t be held in bondage and get to order from Seamless, what more do you people want?”

Sessions’s statement indicates his intention to abdicate his responsibility for equal justice, it’s not a commitment to fight for it. Jeff Sessions seems to think that his office has the power to single-handily roll back the progress of gay rights, and determine which humans have the right to a shot at the American Dream. But racism? Sorry kids, that’s a heart and soul problem, not a legal one.

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Sessions is going to take a lot of actions, like the the Texas voter ID case, that actively retard racial progress in this country. But his goal is to do nothing. He thinks that doing nothing to advance equality under the law is a valid option. Perhaps there are many white people who agree with him.

But reality is just the opposite of what Sessions’s wants it to be. If the laws protecting equal justice were strong, if what laws we have were properly enforced, then it wouldn’t matter what was in a person’s heart, soul, head, pants, or flash drive. You’re a cop who is unreasonably afraid of black people? Too bad: law says you can’t shoot someone without a reasonable fear. You think that Latinos aren’t likely to vote for your preferred candidate? Too bad: law says they have a constitutionally protected right to vote. Hate funding schools where minorities go? Too bad. Don’t want to pick up a brown person heading to Brooklyn? TOO BAD. The law is supposed to tell the racist TOO F**KING BAD, regardless of what insidious theory of supremacy he or she happens to be parroting that week.

Put another way: I don’t give a good goddamn whether Jeff Sessions hates me in his heart or not. I care whether he’s been given the powers of the state to enact his hatred, or enact his complacency.

Jeff Sessions thinks he’s reached the mountaintop just because he barely crawled out of the gutter. Our laws must be saved from his soul.

Justice Dept. Drops a Key Objection to a Texas Voter ID Law [New York Times]


Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.