Yesterday, I read the transcripts of Session's 1986 Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings (when he was nominated by Reagan to serve on the U.S. District Court.) They are more than 500 pages and are available on Lexis, but because of the embedded security used in the document, you can't cut and paste from it.
At the final hearing, Sessions denied making the racist remarks others claimed he made, and said his comment that groups like the NAACP were Un-American were taken out of context. He insisted that his private comment, quoted by others, that he was OK with the KKK until he found out some of them smoked pot, was a joke. Kennedy and Joe Biden said very nasty things about him at the hearing. The vote against him was 10 to 2. Here's an account from The Guardian. "He was only the second man in 50 years to be rejected by the Senate judiciary committee."
I have no idea what his views on race are. I know his views on the war on drugs and penalties are abysmal. I know he has introduced terrible legislation (at least he'll be out of the Senate and won't be able to vote for the tougher sentencing bills Republicans will undoubtedly introduce, knowing that Trump is in their corner.)
I wrote about his views here in 2009. And his demeaning questioning of Justice Kagan at her confirmation hearing in 2010.
Moving on, I didn't read anything about Jared Kushner in the news yesterday. A lawyer I know suggested he remember what happened to Dictator Benito Mussolini's son-in-law, Count Ciano.
Mussolini's daughter Edda was one of his close advisors. Mussolini appointed her husband, Count Ciano, to be his Foreign Minister. When Ciano began to question Mussolini’s conduct of the war he was tried for treason and executed. Edda broke off contact with the fascist dictator for the rest of their lives. She died in 1995, here's the New York Times obituary:
Countess Edda Mussolini Ciano, the eldest daughter and a close adviser of Italy's Fascist dictator, whose husband was executed after he opposed her father's rule, died Saturday in a Rome hospital, doctors said today. She was 84.
... She was a close adviser to Mussolini during the 1930's and was known for her independence at a time when Italian women had few rights.
Her husband, Count Galeazzo Ciano, was Mussolini's Foreign Minister from 1936 to 1943. In July 1943, however, he voted against Mussolini at a Cabinet meeting that led to the dictator's arrest and the fall of Fascism.
Under orders from Hitler, occupying German troops freed Mussolini and installed him as head of a puppet government. It found Count Ciano guilty of treason and ordered him executed. Countess Ciano's pleas to her father and to Hitler were ignored, and her husband was executed by a firing squad in 1944.
... "You are no longer my father for me," she wrote to him. "I renounce the name Mussolini."
Just sayin', history has a tendency to repeat itself. If I were Jared, I'd think twice about rearranging all my finances into some illusory blind trust and moving to Washington. He should keep his day job.
On a somewhat related and ironic note, Bernie Kerik has an article in Kushner's publication The Observer today, about the need for sentencing reform and better opportunities for inmates. He refers to the BOP and DOJ as part of the swamp that needs to be drained. (Ironic because Jared's father-in-law, who is being advised by Jared, has just picked an attorney general who believes in neither.)
