The Real Reason for the Left’s All-Out Assault on Jeff Sessions

by J. Christian Adams,

Observers of this week’s confirmation hearings for the post of U.S. attorney general might think it odd to see Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., rewind the clock to a single voter fraud case from the 1980s.

Under persistent questioning, Sessions has had to defend his decision to prosecute a case of brazen voter fraud—something that was his job to do.

The repeated references to this case by some senators represent just how far the civil rights industry has swerved from its honorable roots to derail a confirmation.

Character assassination, false testimony, performance protests aimed at securing retweets instead of reconciliation, and more have all been trained on the Alabama senator.

The oft-referenced voter fraud case Sessions brought involved the harvesting of absentee ballots by a trio then lionized as “the Perry County Three” in the mid-1980s.

These Perry County defendants faced charges for mail fraud and casting multiple ballots in a single election. They simply stole votes. They weren’t acting to further civil rights—they were committing crimes.

As Sessions mentioned in his testimony, the offense was reported by local black complainants whose absentee ballots were being intercepted and voted without their consent.

But there is a larger problem: It is simply untrue.

The left’s highlighting of this one case demonstrates that the institutional left is afraid. It is afraid it may soon lose enormous power because the Sessions Department of Justice will no longer participate in its radical racialist agenda.

For years going back before the Obama era, the Justice Department has served as a reliable signal caller to increasingly leftward actors that utilize racialized interpretations of law—particularly election policy—to ensure future political victories for Democrats.

The Justice Department used the trappings of civil rights enforcement to advance the cause of the Democratic Party. Indeed, some academics writing about the Voting Rights Act have explicitly called for such partisan enforcement at Department of Justice.

The mess that Sessions must clean up doesn’t end with naked partisanship in civil rights enforcement. It also reaches a racialist interpretation of civil rights, which protects some and neglects to protect others.

A Department of Justice inspector general report released in 2013 noted that there was open hostility among staff toward pursuing voting rights cases against black voters, especially where whites were harmed.

The inspector general investigation also revealed that management-level officers “did not believe the Voting Section should pursue cases on behalf of white victims.” We now see this attitude manifest in the inaction against the violent, racially motivated attacks against Donald Trump voters, despite civil rights laws clearly being implicated.

This is the Justice Department that Sessions will inherit. But unlike his predecessors, the Alabaman’s record directly contrasts with much of the established culture there.

Attorneys general come and go. Every career Department of Justice veteran knows that. But what the establishment left knows even better is that a sea change in law enforcement priorities—like what Sessions promises—can be devastating to grand political designs and personal bank accounts alike.

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