Senator Sessions,
Massive Resistance and States'
Rights
Senator Jeff Sessions' nomination to become the next
U.S. Attorney General has been broadly criticized by civil and human rights advocates.
Criticism has focused on Sessions' attitudes
toward blacks, and to a lesser degree, toward the LGBTQ community. Mr. Brooks and NAACP officials
voluntarily went
to jail in protest. Vida Johnson who
teaches at Georgetown has organized a letter from 1400 law professors in opposition to Sessions. As despicable as racism is, there is
another reason - perhaps just as compelling - to carefully scrutinize
Senator Sessions' public record.
In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education,
the landmark 1954 decision outlawing
government-sanctioned racial segregation,
parts of the South mounted
a campaign of massive resistance to federal law. "If we can
organize the Southern States for massive resistance to this order I think that in time the rest
of the country will realize that racial integration
is not going to be accepted
in the South." With these words, Virginia U.S. Senator Harry Flood Byrd launched
Massive Resistance, a deliberate campaign to delay and obfuscate compliance with federal law.
Opponents
of the Brown ruling and integration used the doctrine
of interposition, which argued that the state could "interpose" between an unconstitutional federal mandate and local
authorities based on State Sovereignty. The
General Assembly adopted a resolution of interposition in 1956 that
clearly defied
the authority of the federal courts.
Fortunately, after more than a decade of
massive resistance, the south slowly
but surely accommodated itself to
open public accommodations. The schools
desegregated, the parks
integrated, city and county councils adopted
single member district plans permitting the first wave
of black elected officials, segregation academies lost their
luster.
Some
Southerners never were reconstructed after the legal
and social civil war that changed America in the middle of the 20th century.
As
Attorney General Mr. Sessions will become the nation's prosecutor in chief. The
massive resistance took the form of closed public
schools, erection of memorials to confederate heroes, hoisting of Confederate battle flags, and in my
hometown turning a public swimming pool over to seals, rather than permit black children access.
Over the
past decade, Mr. Sessions offered legislation that would require states and
cities to accept surplus military equipment. He offered to permit states to
impose criminal penalties for violation of immigration law.
He would permit states to defy and delay
federal enforcement of the Clean Air Act. He authored legislation excluding drinking water quality
from fracking rules. Mr.
Sessions' ideas are so
extreme that most of these measures never made it out
of committee and never became law.
His states' rights positions are so extreme that his fellow conservatives could
not support them in the Senate.
One of
the main tenets of massive resistance and interposition
was the notion that federal government had no role to play in state and local
policy. The most visible symbol of massive resistance was Wallace statement in support of segregation now, tomorrow and forever. Massive resistance was fought out on the battlefield of race relations,
but its philosophical underpinning was always broader.
It is
useful to consider that we struggle today, more than 150 years later, with whether the civil
war was fought over slavery, or states' rights
to fashion their own economies. The great achievement of Dr. Martin Luther
King and his followers was to make it inappropriate to discriminate based on race. But that momentous struggle for civil rights did not settle the question of states' rights.
The States Rights
philosophy lives on. There is a theme that runs through Senator Sessions' public life
that is
more profound and more disqualifying than his racial attitudes, which he has learned,with the
rest of the South to euphemize.
Mr. Sessions' extreme strain
of massive resistance to federal law is
compounded by the harm done to his own constituents. Alabama consistently ranks in the
bottom quintile on every quality of life scale ...income, jobs, education,
wealth, health. After decades of establishing a record in opposition to all
federal "intrusion",
Senator Sessions' constituents are some of the nation's most disadvantaged. A
review of his legislative record seems to
support the view that
Senator Sessions
bears a grudge
against the federal
government, despite the fact
that Alabama is perennially a net recipient of federal aid.
The
Attorney General is the
nation's chief prosecutor . Every prosecutor
has immense power...to choose which
cases to bring, which defendants to negotiate with, which laws to prioritize for enforcement. Just as in the
states, where the Attorney General represents
the State, the U.S. Attorney General represents the United
States. The United States is his client. Every lawyer knows that you cannot represent a client if personal, philosophical, professional or economic interests conflict with the client's to the extent that you cannot present the
merits of the client's case. It is
worth examining the extent to which Mr. Sessions' long defiance of the role of federal government, and his apparent
allegiance to State Sovereignty, disqualify him from representing the United States.
