The Sotomayor Hearings - Branding the Neo-Confederates

If you read the liberal blogosphere, you know about Senator Jefferson Beauregard "Jeff" Sessions's history of dubious racial statements.
If you're following on most of the mainstream media, you don't. You
might even buy the Alabama Republican's not-so-subtle assertion that
Sotomayor is a "racist" -- discriminating against whites -- while
Sessions is above any considerations of color. This will change only if
some Democratic Senator on the judicial committee (though probably not
Al Franken) calls Session on his game, and calls him on his history.

Sessions, as you may know, was rejected for a federal court seat
after calling the NAACP "un-American" because it "forced civil rights
down the throats of people." He also called a white attorney a
"disgrace to his race" for litigating voting rights cases on behalf of
African Americans. And during a murder investigation of the Ku Klux
Klan, he joked, as black former assistant US Attorney Thomas Figures
testified in Sessions's original hearings, about how he had no problems
with the Klan until he discovered they were pot smokers. He also warned
Figures to "be careful what you say to white folks." It's ugly stuff,
and consistent with his racially charged questioning of Judge
Sotomayor: He said she should have voted with a fellow Puerto Rican
judge whose opinions he endorsed, asking, "Is there any instance in
which you'd let your prejudice impact your decisions?"

But the major media still hasn't covered Sessions's history. It's
too loaded, jarring, and ugly. CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin did
raise related issues, saying: "What's worth noting about what Jeff
Sessions -- the line of questioning, was that being a white man, that's
normal. Everybody else has biases and prejudices ... but the white man,
they don't have any ethnicity, they don't have any gender, they're just
like the normal folks."

But the worst of the history remains largely buried, and therefore
invisible to most of the public. For that to change, some Democratic
senator on the judicial committee must breach Senate decorum, and say
bluntly and unequivocally that someone with Sessions's history can't
say Sotomayor's relationship to her racial identity makes her less fit
to be a Supreme Court Justice. They'll have to say that so strongly
that the major media has to cover it, and therefore make it central to
the hearings.

A Democratic senator must do this because it's the truth and it will
resonate politically. The way Sessions, Rush Limbaugh and others are
going after Sotomayor jibes with how the Republicans are now the party
of older white Southerners -- barely reconstructed Confederates. In an
electorate that's becoming younger and more racially diverse, that's
not a winning brand. So while some in the heart of dear old Dixie may
cheer Sessions on, my hunch is that most now coming of age feel at
least somewhat embarrassed about his approach. So do most whites in the
rest of the country, particularly younger ones. So do the Latinos who
are proudly anticipating Sotomayor's ratification. And the Republicans
have long since lost the African American vote, something black RNC
chairman Michael Steele is unlikely to reverse with recent talk of
winning them back with "fried chicken and potato salad." (What, no watermelon?)

Sotomayor can't raise this history. She must stay above the fray,
since once she gets confirmed she'll be making her case to a jury of
one: Justice Kennedy. Barring some unlikely conversion, Alito, Thomas,
Scalia and Roberts are so bought into a hard-right authoritarian
politics that, ties to hawkish neocons aside, they'd fit seamlessly
into affirming the election in Ahmadinejad's Iran.

Suppose, however, one of the Democratic senators on the judicial
committee raised this history bluntly and unequivocally. True, it would
break senate congeniality, and the Republicans would protest. But the
Democrats will never have Sessions's vote, and the more his race
baiting becomes an issue, the better for the Democrats long-term -- and
maybe for the Republicans too, if they're ever going to emerge from
this kind of politics. To make that happen, at least one Democratic
senator will need to step up.

Any takers?