This Is Why Senate Democrats Fought Jeff Sessions

Last updated on: February 28, 2017 at 8:47 am by Libby Anne

This Is Why Senate Democrats Fought Jeff Sessions 2017-02-28T08:47:00-04:00 Libby Anne

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Jeff Sessions’ actions in the three weeks since he was confirmed as U.S. Attorney General suggest that Senate Democrats were right to be concerned about his record. First on the chopping block, for Sessions, was transgender students’ bathroom access:

In a joint letter, the top civil rights officials from the Justice Department and the Education Department rejected the Obama administration’s position that nondiscrimination laws require schools to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms of their choice.

…

The question of how to address the “bathroom debate,” as it has become known, opened a rift inside the Trump administration, pitting Education Secretary Betsy DeVos against Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Mr. Sessions, who had been expected to move quickly to roll back the civil rights expansions put in place under his Democratic predecessors, wanted to act decisively because of two pending court cases that could have upheld the protections and pushed the government into further litigation.

But Ms. DeVos initially resisted signing off and told Mr. Trump that she was uncomfortable because of the potential harm that rescinding the protections could cause transgender students, according to three Republicans with direct knowledge of the internal discussions.

Mr. Sessions, who has opposed expanding gay, lesbian and transgender rights, pushed Ms. DeVos to relent. After getting nowhere, he took his objections to the White House because he could not go forward without her consent. Mr. Trump sided with his attorney general, the Republicans said, and told Ms. DeVos in a meeting in the Oval Office on Tuesday that he wanted her to drop her opposition. And Ms. DeVos, faced with the alternative of resigning or defying the president, agreed to go along.

I will join you in your complete and total confusion regarding DeVos’ position here. Not surprising at all, however, is Sessions’ effort to end the Obama directives instructing schools to allow trans students to use the bathrooms appropriate to their gender identity. While Sessions ultimately got Trump on board, remember that Trump had stated during the primary that he didn’t have a problem with transgender people using the bathrooms appropriate to their gender identity—in other words, it appears that Sessions pressured Trump to drop his support for transgender bathroom access, with what inducements we may never know.

Sessions wanted to act quickly in part in order to ensure that several cases winding their way through the courts didn’t uphold transgender bathroom access before the White House ended it. In other words, Sessions didn’t just affect the now, he also affected the future by making moot cases that could have set judicial precedent.

Next on Sessions’ agenda? Voter ID laws:

The Republican-led Texas Legislature passed one of the toughest voter ID laws in the country in 2011, requiring voters to show a driver’s license, passport or other government-issued photo ID before casting a ballot.

The Obama administration’s Justice Department sued Texas to block the law in 2013 and scored a major victory last year after a federal appeals court ruled that the law needed to be softened because it discriminated against minority voters who lacked the required IDs.

Opponents of the law said Republican lawmakers selected IDs that were most advantageous for Republican-leaning white voters and discarded IDs that were beneficial to Democratic-leaning minority voters. For example, legislators included licenses to carry concealed handguns, which are predominantly carried by whites, and excluded government employee IDs and public university IDs, which are more likely to be used by blacks, Hispanics and Democratic-leaning younger voters.

But the Justice Department under President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions told a judge on Monday that it was withdrawing its claim that Texas enacted the law with a discriminatory intent.

The Justice Department remains a party in the case. But it is pulling back at a crucial phase. If a judge finds the state acted with discriminatory intent, as the Justice Department and other plaintiffs have alleged, Texas could be forced to seek federal approval before it makes any changes to its voting laws or procedures. That would have major impacts on voting rules in Texas and be a potent symbol of the ability of the federal government to be a major brake on voting discrimination nationally.

This may seem like a small thing, but it’s not. Efforts to restrict voting via voter ID requirements have the potential to have profound electoral consequences.

Conservatives tend to support voter ID laws, which purport to cut down on voting fraud by requiring voters to show a photo ID. Progressives tend to be skeptical toward these laws because millions of eligible voters, particularly poor people, people of color, the elderly or disabled, and those living in urban areas where a car (and therefore a driver’s license) is unnecessary, do not have a photo ID. Obtaining a photo ID is an added expense and logistical challenge for many of these people.

Added to this, of course, is the reality that voter fraud is rare—so rare as to make voter ID laws a clear stand-in for something else. As in fact they often are—in many states Republican lawmakers have plainly stated that they’re passing voter ID laws to suppress the Democratic vote, often by preventing poor African American communities from voting. Yes, really.

The Justice Department isn’t withdrawing from the case entirely, but in withdrawing key claims central to the case, they change the terms of the debate.

But we’re not done yet. Next up: private prisons.

The Justice Department said Thursday that it would continue to use private, for-profit prisons to house thousands of federal inmates, scrapping an Obama administration plan to phase them out because of problems.

…

In a memo released on Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions directed federal prison officials to keep using the private prisons. He also withdrew a policy set out last August by Sally Q. Yates, then the deputy attorney general, who had ordered prison officials to phase out the use of the private facilities.

Ms. Yates’s order had followed a report from the Justice Department inspector general about safety and security concerns with the operations at private prisons, along with other issues. The private prisons “compare poorly to our own bureau facilities” in a number of areas and do not save much money, Ms. Yates wrote as she ordered them phased out.

Private prisons are a problem for a whole host of reasons (as anyone who has kept up with Orange is the New Black can tell you). In many cases private prisons are not subject to the same regulatory requirements as state-run prisons—nor are they subject to the same accountability measures or records requirements. The potential for abuse should be obvious. And because the companies are in the business of making money off of the prisoners they house—they’re for-profit—they have an incentive to cut corners everywhere possible. And perhaps because they do this, their recidivism rates are higher.

The confirmation of Jeff Sessions as U.S. Attorney General will continue to reverberate for a very long time. Whether it’s trans rights, voting rights, or criminal justice reform, under Sessions the Justice Department will no longer fight for justice.

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