Past racial insensitivity by Sotomayor detractor. Ref: Sessions vows third GOP vote against Sotomayor

   By: Ken Bode
Sometime next week, Sonia Sotomayor will be confirmed as the first person of Hispanic descent ever to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Over the past 219 years, there have been two women and two African-Americans on the court along with 106 white males.

Sotomayor will be confirmed because the Senate Judiciary Committee could find nothing disqualifying in her 17 years experience on the federal bench. Still, suspicious Republicans on the panel turned to her personal views, especially as related to ethnicity. Has ever a single sentence been so blown out of proportion as when Sotomayor suggested that because of her life’s experiences a wise Latina might reach a better conclusion than a white male?

Especially for the ranking white male on the Republican inquisition forces on the committee, Sotomayor’s comment was deeply troubling. In the mind of Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, Sotomayor’s comment revealed excessive racial sensitivity, and Sessions sought to turn it into a mountain blocking Senate approval.

Sessions knows about racial insensitivity. Now the lead Republican interrogator, Sessions was at the Judiciary Committee witness table 23 years ago, nominated for a federal judgeship by President Ronald Reagan. Then, too, the issue was excessive racial insensitivity. Sessions was serving as a U.S. attorney in Alabama, and some of the things he’d been doing and saying were brought to the attention of the committee.

For example, Sessions called a white civil rights attorney who litigated voting rights cases “a disgrace to his race.” He addressed an assistant U.S. attorney as “boy” and warned him, “Be careful what you say to white folks.” He admitted he thought the Ku Klux Klan was an “OK” organization until he learned that some of them smoked pot. Also, Sessions condemned the NAACP and ACLU as “un-American” and “Communist inspired,” because they “forced civil rights down the throats of people.”

   Jeff Sessions [ Enlarge ]
But it was what he did that mattered most. Sessions served as U.S. attorney at a time when black voter registration drives were threatening white control of county courthouses in rural Alabama. Who wins elections for governor or senator is of minor importance to the locals compared to who wins the job of county sheriff, prosecutor, judge, clerk, treasurer and assessor.

In the 1980s, Perry County, Ala., retained its old plantation roots of unremitting distrust between its black majority and white minority. With black voter registration surging in Perry County, control of country government was dangerously close to shifting. So U.S. Attorney Sessions used the power of his office to back charges by the white courthouse crowd that a black civil rights group was tampering with absentee ballots.

An investigation was ordered and federal officials were waiting at the post office when the Perry County Civic League mailed 504 absentee ballots for the 1984 Democratic primary. The ballots were opened, marked, numbered and searched for erasures or new markings.

Searching for evidence of tampering, FBI investigators contacted 1,500 black families in Perry County, terrifying many first-time voters in their 70s and 80s. Among those charged with 29 counts of altering ballots and mail fraud was Albert Turner, an adviser to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Turner helped plan the Selma march and was later chosen to guide the mule train that carried King to his gravesite. He and his two Perry County co-defendants faced 115 years in prison.

The investigation is estimated to have cost the government $500,000, and it produced evidence so thin that it took the jury less than four hours to throw out the case.

Sessions was so obviously guilty of racism and overreaching his prosecutorial authority that the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 8-to-6 to derail his nomination. The majority against him included two Republicans and his home state senator, Howell Heflin.

I covered those events for NBC News, and during the Sotomayor hearings I wondered what Jeff Sessions had learned about racial insensitivity and impartiality. Evidently, not much.

About The Author(s): Ken Bode — is the Pulliam Professor of Journalism at DePauw University and a Hudson adjunct fellow. His academic career includes being the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism as well as the Dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University from 1998 to 2002; a John L. Hughes University Professor and Director of the Center for Contemporary Media at DePauw University from 1989 1997; and an assistant professor of political science at Michigan State University from 1965 to 1969 and at SUNY Binghamton from 1969 to 1970. Bode is a 1961 graduate of the University of South Dakota, where he was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate in philosophy and government. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina in 1963 and 1966, respectively. He has taught at Michigan State University and the State University of New York at Binghamton. Bode was a post-doctoral fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University in 1978 and a Poynter Fellow in journalism at Yale University in 1989. He also was a senior adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute in Indianapolis.

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By: Prof. Ken Bode

Prof. Ken Bode
Today, 80 percent of Americans think our country is on the wrong track.

With a cratering economy, an endless war in Iraq and an uncomprehending president, that is understandable. Rarely has there been a moment when clarity of choice and opportunity for change has been so clear.

On Tuesday, Indiana voters have a monumental opportunity to help set our country on a new course.

I have cast an early vote for Sen. Barack Obama, and I’ll tell you why.

In the Democratic primary, the choice is between experience and judgment. For all the experience she extols, Hillary Clinton still carries the albatross of her opportunistic vote favoring the Iraq war. She explains lamely that she didn’t realize President Bush would take her blank check and cash it. Obama rightly opposed the war from the start.

Both candidates say they would get out of Iraq, but Obama would approach the necessary regional security arrangements in the Middle East by opening a dialogue with states like Syria and Iran, abandoning the stubborn silence of the Bush policies. Clinton approaches the problem with threats to obliterate Iran with “massive retaliation.” Her rhetoric is drawn from the Cold War past, revealing the “bring-them-on” mentality of Bush.

Overall, Obama represents the best chance we have to address the greatest threat facing America, the stateless terrorism of the Islamic world. As The Atlantic magazine’s Andrew Sullivan said, if you seek the simplest and most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about America in ways no words can. Obama’s mere presence in the Oval Office would help defuse anti-American passions around the world.

The electorate also is hungry for change in the way our government does business at home. Clinton has more experience in Washington, but that has not helped her to understand its problems. She solicits money from special interests and picked a major lobbyist to run her campaign. Judging by their different policies, Obama’s shorter time in Washington is more an asset than a handicap.

The most important reason that Indiana voters should support Obama on Tuesday is that he represents America’s greatest opportunity to pivot away from the past. While Clinton talks about change, Obama embodies it. He radiates a sense of possibility and has a proven ability to engage and inspire young people to public service like no candidate since John F. Kennedy. He has produced a nationwide surge of new voters, in itself an expression of the nation’s hunger for change. For the past 20 years, two families, the Bushes and Clintons, have run the country, longer than the newest voters — and many serving in Iraq — have been alive. Obama would change that.

Too late for many, Obama finally and firmly denounced the pronouncements of his preacher. Rev. Jeremiah Wright now takes his place in the pantheon of pastors who bring strange ideas from the pulpit to politics.

Bush supporter Rev. Jerry Falwell claimed the 9/11 attacks occurred because American secularism had forfeited God’s protection.

Rudy Giuliani backer Pat Robertson claimed that accepting homosexuality could result in earthquakes, tornados and a possible meteor. And John McCain’s supporter, televangelist John Hagee, said Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for a New Orleans gay rights parade. Politicians cannot be held responsible for the crazy rantings of preachers.

Voters also must remember that the Clintons represent a partnership of endless uncertainty. Bill Clinton squandered the last two years of his presidency by recklessly dallying with Monica Lewinsky, producing impeachment, and jeopardizing the election of Al Gore. Had that not happened, America would not be in Iraq today. In our choice on Tuesday, Hillary and Bill Clinton clearly represent the past, a page turned backward, and Barack Obama represents the future.

While endorsing Obama, a former Clinton administration official put it this way: “I don’t think I’m ready for the circus to come back to town.”

About The Author: Ken A. Bode is the Pulliam Professor of Journalism at DePauw University and a Hudson adjunct fellow. His academic career includes being the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism as well as the Dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University from 1998 to 2002; a John L. Hughes University Professor and Director of the Center for Contemporary Media at DePauw University from 1989 1997; and an assistant professor of political science at Michigan State University from 1965 to 1969 and at SUNY Binghamton from 1969 to 1970. Bode received his B.A. (cum laude) from the University of South Dakota in 1961 and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina.