By Eugene Scott, washingtonpost.com
When President Trump nominated Jeff Sessions to be the attorney general, Democratic lawmakers argued that the then-senator from Alabama becoming the nation’s top prosecutor would be a step backward in advancing the relationship between the Justice Department and people of color.
“I think he’s a racist, I think he’s a throwback and I don’t mind saying it, any day of the week,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) told The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart in May.
Other lawmakers expressed concern about Sessions’s commitment to diversity during his nomination hearing, where Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) attempted to read excerpts of a letter written more than 30 years ago by Coretta Scott King, the wife of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., to Congress to block Sessions’s appointment to a federal bench out of concern that it would “irreparably damage the work of my husband.”
