After losing significant power in both federal and state offices, Hillary Clinton’s defeat created an ongoing crisis amongst the Democratic Party elite. As chronicled a few weeks ago, in response, many Democrats began rejecting the use of identity politics as a means of channeling a message. Part of the reason why this happened relates to how out of touch the Democratic Party is to average Americans.
One topic where the Democrats failed to convince Americans to trust them on includes immigration. According to a Pew Research Center study from 2014, only 23% of Americans solely wanted to prioritize finding a way for illegal immigrants to become citizens compared to the 33% who prioritized secure borders and stricter law enforcement and 41% who believed both should be prioritized together. During the election, Democrats mostly emphasized on what only 23% of the population wanted to prioritize and relied on use of identity politics language to muster support from their base.
Suffice it to say, that did not work against Donald Trump, who ran on securing the border and stronger law enforcement. Once Trump won the election, he signaled his intention to remain committed to the aforementioned policies by nominating Alabama’s junior senator Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, whose confirmation hearings occurred this week.
Sessions is a harsh critic of amnesty who voted against a 2007 comprehensive immigration reform bill championed by then-President George W. Bush that supposedly would have granted millions of illegal immigrants amnesty. Utilizing his extensive legal background, Sessions defended his opposition to the bill by claiming that it ran contrary to what United States law should be about.
Furthermore, Sessions spent much of his career fighting for civil rights. Under his tenure as Alabama’s Attorney General, Sessions prosecuted Henry Hays, the son of the leader of Alabama’s Ku Klux Klan, for the savage murder of a black teenager, and sentenced him to death while serving a successful lawsuit that subsequently bankrupted the Klan. He also worked tirelessly to fight against voter fraud in Alabama as US Attorney in Alabama in the 1980s. The controversy that the Democrats and their liberal allies created was over the fact that Sessions targeted black civil rights leaders during a 1985 case, thus making his lawsuit racially motivated.
On the first day of hearings, Jeff Sessions indicated the following: 1) He would recuse himself from any investigation on Hillary Clinton given his comments during Trump’s campaign; 2) He would respect the outcomes of Roe v. Wade and Obergefell despite his own personal objections to those Supreme Court decisions; 3) He would ensure that the Department of Justice would remain a nonpartisan body that would not bend at the will of President-elect Trump; 4) He would not support a Muslim ban since it would violate the United States Constitution and he would uphold all of the civil rights laws as he has done throughout his career as a lawyer and a senator; 5) He stated that waterboarding constitutes torture and it is illegal under United States law; and 6) He would uphold the laws of the land, respect the Constitution, and would remain committed to the rule of law. All of those things indicate that Jeff Sessions would be a welcome replacement to Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, who made a mockery out of the Justice Department for their numerous scandals from Fast and Furious to the meeting on the tarmac.
Throughout the confirmation hearings, the Democrats in the Senate Judiciary Committee and their legal activist allies attempted to peg Sessions as either a racist, a sexist, a bigot, or a homophobe while also attempting to distort the record. With regard to the 1985 voter fraud case, Ted Cruz set the record straight with David Cole of the ACLU, saying that the initial complainant was an African-American himself, defusing the racism card in that particular argument. When Senator Al Franken, a progressive career comedian wearing a Senatorial pin, utilized an opinion column that distorted Sessions’ role in a handful of civil rights cases in Alabama. Once again, Ted Cruz slammed Franken for obscuring the record and relying on what can best be described as “fake news.” In addition, in what can only be described as chutzpah, Sen. Richard Blumenthal used talking points from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a leftist front group masquerading as a civil rights organization, to peg Sessions as a bigot for accepting awards from politically incorrect organizations like the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the Center for Security Policy and asked him if he would ever accept an award from the KKK. Sessions rightfully responded to Blumenthal’s shameful attempts at guilt by association by pointing out that he, along with Sen. Blumenthal supposedly, receive hundreds of awards from various organizations and that he does not hold the SPLC as a final authority on what constitutes a radical group.
However, nothing demonstrated the Democrats’ failure to land a glove on Sessions on the merits of his record more than Sen. Cory Booker’s testimony. Breaking away from the long tradition of Senate colleagues not testifying against each other for executive positions, Booker expressed his belief that Sessions would not stand for civil rights of all Americans without giving any convincing evidence that he would be unable to uphold the laws as they are written. The best explanation for Cory Booker’s testimony and his decision to do so was best summarized by Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro in the following tweet:
Cory Booker’s testimony, in a nutshell pic.twitter.com/PK0ovajf0i
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) January 11, 2017
In another display of cognitive dissonance, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who nominated an anti-Semite for Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, announced today that he would vote against the confirmation of his “friend and colleague” for Attorney General. He defended his decision claiming the same talking points that neither the Democrats in the Judiciary Committee nor their allies could defend on the merits of Sessions’s confirmation hearings. In other words, many Democrats remain poised to deny Jeff Sessions the highest law enforcement office in the land simply based on feelings, speculation, hyperbole, and false charges that failed to stick him during the confirmation.
What do the Jeff Sessions confirmation hearings reveal about the current trajectory of the Democratic Party? It will continue to operate on character assassination of any Republican they strongly disagree with on policy and it will still use identity politics as a means to rally their base. While Sessions’s record on civil rights, voting rights, and his dedication to impartiality in the law are undeniable, the Democrats continue to use the same debunked talking points that put the party in its current precarious state in the first place. They do not want to tolerate an Attorney General who opposes DACA and other executive orders that outgoing President Obama used to further a progressive agenda, an Attorney General who wishes to uphold the nation’s laws on immigration and civil rights, and anyone who represents the American electorate who refused to give the Democrats power in the first place.
In other words, the Democratic Party has not learned from its failures from the 2016 election and it will continue its failing strategy of dividing the nation on racial lines, calling anyone who disagrees with them bigoted, and deliberately refusing to concede that the majority of the American public does not want to see their policies forced down their throats.
It’s a bold strategy, but it will not help their case to win the midterm elections in 2018.
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