Sessions fights for racist outcomes. Who cares what's in his heart?

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/01/jeff_sessions_fights_for_racist_outcomes_who_care_what_s_in_his_heart.html

In just a moment, Graham and Sessions had turned a conversation about the Alabama senator’s actions into a referendum on his character, one in which his discomfort with the language of racism matters more than the weight of his choices as a prosecutor and policymaker. Sessions is a controversial nominee for a reason. As the NAACP Legal Defense Fund details in its report on the Alabama lawmaker, “An unrelenting hostility toward civil rights and racial justice has been the defining feature of Jeff Sessions’ professional life.”

As a prosecutor in the 1980s, Sessions pursued a voter fraud case against three activists—Albert Turner, Evelyn Turner, and Spencer Hogue—who spearheaded voter registration efforts on behalf of black voters in Alabama. They gave assistance to those needing help casting a ballot, from elderly voters to those who were illiterate or who could not get to the polls on Election Day. Sessions indicted the three on the charge that this assistance was a crime, despite its protection under the Voting Rights Act. Moreover, Sessions declined to investigate similar activity among groups working with white candidates. The double standard was so egregious that a court agreed with the defendants that Sessions’ office “was activated by constitutionally impermissible motives such as racial … discrimination.”

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At every turn, when met with efforts to increase diverse representation or reverse the vast racial disparities in the criminal justice system, Jeff Sessions has stood in opposition. He has disparaged groups working to reform the death penalty, publicly supported “chain gangs” for prisoners in Alabama, and worked against bipartisan efforts to reform federal sentencing, including severe mandatory minimums that fall hardest on black and Latino offenders. In one exchange on Tuesday with Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, Sessions confirmed that he still opposes an effort to make sentencing reform retroactive for drug offenders imprisoned under the now-defunct 100-to-1 crack-cocaine disparity. And while Sessions says “it’s not the attorney general’s decision about when and where a mandatory minimum is imposed and whether it can be retroactively altered,” it is true that the attorney general can influence the guidance provided to federal prosecutors, as evidenced by Eric Holder’s decision to move prosecutors away from harsh punishments of minor drug offenders.

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Sessions is frustrated by what he calls a “caricature” of his views that cost him a federal judgeship in 1986. He believes accusations of racism are “very painful.” We shouldn’t doubt his feelings. But we should evaluate his actions. If the question is a commitment to civil rights, Jeff Sessions falls far short. That conservatives such as Graham insist, against this background, that accusations of racism are unfair is deeply revealing of the right-wing attitude toward racism: that it’s OK to devote your career to racial reaction so long as you have a black friend or two, that it’s entirely about the individual and what is or isn’t in his heart. In the Republican imagination, racism itself has been privatized.