Racial issues likely to come up at Sessions’ Senate hearing

Even outside the LGBT community, the reaction was unusually harsh.

The Rev. Jeffrey Brown, associate pastor of the Twelfth Baptist Church in Boston, said he’s unhappy with Trump’s choices, particularly Sessions.

The Republican US president-elect on Friday named Alabama senator Jeff Sessions for the position of US attorney general and Kansas representative Mike Pompeo as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency – both candidates require senate confirmation before they take up their posts. “Thus far, Trump has shown a preference for loyalists and firebrands who are unlikely to put peoples’ nerves at ease”.

“The opening message from the Trump transition is: What you heard in the campaign is what you’re going to get in his presidency”, said Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University. He has said former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden should enjoy due process and then be sentenced to death for taking and releasing secret documents about surveillance programs in which the USA government collected the phone records of millions of Americans.

There, he earned the Human Rights Campaign’s Congressional Scorecard’s lowest possible score -zero- on LGBT-related voting and issues.

Leahy voted against Sessions for a district judgeship when he last came before the Judiciary Committee in 1986.

Trump tweeted to his 15 million followers Saturday that he only settled to better focus on leading the U.S. Earlier this year, Sessions spoke out against marijuana legalization in a Senate hearing, and urged the government to send the message to the public that “good people don’t smoke marijuana”. Sessions said it would lead to sisters marrying each other or a mother marrying her daughter.

Sessions is also known for his anti-immigration position.

That same deputy, Thomas Figures, said that Sessions had called him “boy” on more than one occasion and had said that he thought the Ku Klux Klan was “okay until he learned that they smoked marijuana”. “His record of opposing racial justice, reproductive freedom, and basic equality for women and LGBT people should be disqualifying-and would have been disqualifying at any time in the past five decades”.

Both Democratic and Republican critics have argued that companies such as Walt Disney Co and Southern California Edison Co, a utility, have used the program to terminate in-house IT employees and replace them with cheaper contractors.

“Branding becomes a liability when the feds zealously start enforcing federal law”, Figueroa said.

Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, issued a statement, calling Sessions “vehemently anti-LGBTQ”. Pompeo and Pence served in Congress together from 2010 to 2014, and developed a political rapport as part of the most conservative faction of the House Republican majority. But that of Sessions as attorney general does, and he has baggage: racially charged comments he made in the 1980s and which once cost him a chance for a job for life as a federal judge.

None can question either Trump’s right to pick the 69-year-old Sessions, or the latter’s credentials, in terms of experience, as a former US attorney and legislator.

All three have been fierce critics of President Barack Obama’s handling of terrorism and national security, and their selection likely signals a sharp shift in USA policy.

At the same time, voters in Florida, North Dakota and Arkansas approved marijuana for medical use, while Montana residents voted to loosen restrictions on the state’s medical marijuana laws.

Sessions’ civil rights record matters because, if confirmed, he would have oversight of a division that Holder has described as the Justice Department’s “crown jewel”. He was serving as the United States attorney for the southern district of Alabama at the time.

Pompeo and fellow Republican Jim Jordan of OH, however, issued a separate report slamming Clinton and the Obama administration.

Sessions was born in 1946 in Selma, Alabama, the birthplace of the historic civil rights march to Montgomery in 1965.

As a senator, Sessions criticized the Justice Department in 2009 for dismissing three defendants from a voting rights lawsuit against the New Black Panther Party after allegations of voter intimidation outside a Philadelphia polling place.