Jeff Sessions: An Attorney General to Restore the Rule of Law

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By Andrew C. McCarthy

I have only one complaint regarding the splendid news that President-elect Donald Trump will nominate Senator Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) to be the next attorney general of the United States: He is such a valuable legislator, he may be irreplaceable in the Senate.

But that's alright. The Senate is going to be the Senate. Plus, there are talented young conservatives with strong legal backgrounds there, so hope springs that one can step into Jeff's big shoes.

By contrast, the Justice Department, the institution in which I proudly spent most of my professional life as a lawyer, is in crisis. For eight years, we have had not the rule of law but a Ruler of Law - the imperial president, Barack Obama, aided and abetted by his hyper-political courtiers Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, derelict in the fundamental duty of his office to execute the laws faithfully.

The Obama Justice Department has been the most politicized in the nation's history. It has weaponized the law against the president's political adversaries and scapegoats, while insulating the president's allies against investigation and prosecution. It has made progressive political activism the touchstone of Justice Department hiring, stacking various departmental sections with social-justice warriors who see the law as their arsenal to achieve fundamental societal transformation.

It has exploited the legal process as an extortionate tool to shakedown deep-pocketed institutions for the purpose of funding progressive rabble-rousers. It has used law-enforcement to craft political narratives that, for example, propped up Obama's "blame the video" fraud after the Benghazi massacre; framed the nation's financial institutions for the mortgage meltdown, to the exclusion of reckless government policies; and undermined Second Amendment rights while getting federal agents killed (see the "Fast and Furious" debacle, over which Holder was held in contempt of Congress). It has injected racial discrimination into the enforcement of civil-rights laws in blatant violation of the equal-protection principles those laws are supposed to assure. It has exhibited a contempt for Congress and a propensity to obstruct legislative oversight that would have made the Nixon administration blush.

It has repeatedly engaged in appalling prosecutorial misconduct and then lied to federal judges to cover it up. It has not only refused to enforce the immigration laws and sued to prevent sovereign states from enforcing them, but has also endorsed the president's claimed power to ignore congressional statutes. It is abetting a war on the nation's police departments, seeking to nationalize them under the guise of baseless and ruinously divisive smears that cops are hunting down African-American men, and that the justice system is rigged against black people.
Senator Sessions, an accomplished lawyer and a good and decent man, is the right remedy for the Justice Department's extreme ailments.

As a highly experienced former federal prosecutor and United States attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, he has great respect for the Justice Department's traditions and its mission of vigorous, apolitical law-enforcement - amply demonstrated by his prosecutions of civil-rights violations that helped break segregation in Alabama's public-school system.

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