Call: Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto
Phone: 202-224-3542
Call: Sen. Dean Heller
Phone: 202-224-6244
Senator Jeff Sessions is a dangerous man. First he built a career on opposing civil rights. Now he’s mere days away from becoming America’s next Attorney General.
Sessions is on a mission to undo the immense progress made by the Obama administration on police accountability; protecting gay, lesbian, and transgender people from discrimination; protecting voting rights; scaling back the misguided war on drugs and enacting commonsense criminal justice reform.
Stopping Sessions from becoming Attorney General won’t be easy. But we can do it if Democrats stand together and we manage to peel away two Republican votes. Direct contact from constituents is one of the most effective ways of influencing our elected representatives.
That means our Senators need to hear from us directly and, with the confirmation hearings on Tuesday, they need to hear from us NOW. Will you make a call to your Senators asking them to stop Jeff Sessions’ appointment?
Jeff Sessions is a committed opponent of civil rights for the LGBTQ community. Sessions voted to ban marriage equality, supports so-called “religious freedom” laws that would protect discrimination against LGBTQ people, and he voted against extending hate crimes laws to include gender and sexual orientation. Sessions thinks it should be permissible to discriminate against people for their sexual orientation and gender presentation, even if they’re legally married under the laws of this country. That’s just plain unacceptable.
Sessions has also been an ardent opponent of civil rights for racial minorities. As a US Attorney in the 1980s, he persecuted civil rights workers who were helping to register poor black folks by bringing bogus election fraud charges against them. Sessions has opposed the Voting Rights Act, calling it “a piece of intrusive legislation.” He publicly applauded the Supreme Court’s decision to gut the Voting Rights Act in 2013. And he opposed the bipartisan criminal justice reform bill in the last Congress.
Sessions has been no friend to women, either. He voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. He’s aggressively anti-choice. And Sessions recently defended Donald Trump’s recorded bragging about grabbing women by their genitals without consent by saying, “I don’t characterize that as sexual assault.”
In 1986 the US Senate rejected Sessions’ nomination for a federal judgeship when they heard testimony that he had referred to a black prosecutor as “boy” and said that he thought the KKK was fine “until I found out they smoked pot.” And the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights notes that Sessions received awards from groups designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as anti-Muslim hate groups.
Jeff Sessions should not have the responsibility of fairly and evenly applying the law for all Americans. We must stop his confirmation.
References:
1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jeff-sessions-lgbt-rights_us_58346cd9e4b030997bc1524f
2. http://www.ontheissues.org/Domestic/Jeff_Sessions_Civil_Rights.htm
3. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jeff-sessions-attorney-general-common-cause_us_586e7a4fe4b043ad97e20abe
4. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/sessions-as-ag-means-criminal-justice-reform-is-dead.html
5. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/18/its-not-clear-if-trump-attorney-general-sessions-thinks-grabbing-a-woman-by-the-crotch-is-sexual-assault
6. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/18/10-things-to-know-about-sen-jeff-sessions-donald-trumps-pick-for-attorney-general
7. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/five-chilling-ways-senator-jeff-sessions-could-attack-immigrants-as-attorney-general_us_5870022ce4b099cdb0fd2ef7