Top Republican calls Puerto Rican civil rights group ‘extremist’
Published: July 3, 2009
Updated 4 months ago
For weeks opponents of Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court have been looking for an angle on which to base their criticism, and it appears they have found one.
Republicans on the Hill are zeroing in on Sotomayor’s involvement with what Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, is calling an “extreme” Puerto Rican legal advocacy group.
From 1980 to 1992, Sotomayor sat on the board of governors of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF), a group that, according to the New York Times, “pursued lawsuits over issues like affirmative action, bilingual education, and gerrymandering election districts to increase minority voting power.”
The Times writes:
Republicans would like to tie her to those cases, while the White House would like to distance her from them. But the extent to which she was in a position to influence the group’s court filings remains murky, prompting a dispute over whether more documents exist that should be turned over and how to interpret the ones already in the Senate’s hands.
On Wednesday, for example, after the group turned over 300 pages of material to the Senate, a spokesman for the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, said the material showed she had “deeper-than-previously thought involvement in developing the legal positions of the organization.”
Senate Republicans are evidently concerned about the PRLDEF’s role in opposing then-President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987. CNN reports that:
During [Sotomayor's] years on the PRLDEF board, the group opposed President Reagan’s 1987 nomination of the conservative Bork — then a federal appeals judge — “because of the threat he poses to the civil rights of the Latino community,” according to the documents.
The group’s attorneys prepared press releases and “worked on numerous efforts to build coalitions against the nominee,” according to the documents. Bork was ultimately rejected by the Senate.
Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, has argued that the revelations of Sotomayor’s involvement with PRLDEF are further proof that Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing, scheduled to begin July 12, should be delayed. Republicans on the Hill have been complaining that they have not had enough time to go through the documents related to Sotomayor’s nomination.
The Obama administration and Democrats on the Hill are wasting little time taking control of the latest controversy over Sotomayor, highlighting the fact that Sotomayor’s position on the board did not mean that she had any direct control over the PRLDEF’s legal actions or policy positions.
“Judge Sotomayor was never an employee of PRLDEF nor did she ever supervise the work of PRLDEF staff,” White House counsel Greg Craig wrote (PDF). “As a Board member, she served on several outside committees, including at times on the Litigation Committee. Throughout her service, staff attorneys, the General Counsel, and the President directed PRLDEF’s litigation, not the Board or the Litigation Committee.”
Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) brushed off the accusations, saying that the Republican Senate minority would find something to object to “even if the president had nominated Moses.”
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Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee will spew forth anything that will give himself
MEDIA ATTENTION. He is an EXTREMIST MEDIA CHASER. A politician but NOT a statesman. Sessions’ interest in the average Americans lives is LESS THAN ZERO.
Jeff Sessions was denied an appointment to be a judge back in the ’80s for his bigoted past. He was proven to be a racist pig. Why would anyone think he is better?
If they were to team up with Acorn they could take over the free world as we know it.
Jeff Sessions is accomplishing an extraordinary feat of political acrobatics and marksmanship. He has discovered a way to shoot himself in the foot while one foot is in his mouth and the other is up his ass.
Everyone knows that Jeff Sessions is just another bigoted obstructionist asshole anyway. That’s why Alabamans re-elected him. A bitter little man still pissed off that he didn’t get his life-long appointment as a federal judge in 1986. Just because he likes the KKK and hates the NAACP.
Go away Jeff.
My God, Imagine the extremism, actually trying to get your rights from a country that brags about being the freedom capital of the world. Imagine the gall, filing papers in court, the way that these things are ACTUALLY DONE in the country that rules you and that you have no real connection to. What extremism! Actually trying to do things legally to get what is supposed to be yours in the first place.
What an ass.
Jeffrey Bouregard Sessions could not get confirmed when he was nominated for the federal bench and now he thinks he can hold up anyone else from getting appointed. Sessions is a card carrying member of the KKK and should sit down and shut up before his robes get blown off in the hot air escaping from his butt where his mouth is located. He’s a 26% CRACKER of the first order. Jeffrey, we don’t give a rats ass what you have to fart out.
sessions another rebel queer
LOL - Sessions must be really butt-hurt that his friends and family of right-wing extremists, domestic terrorists if you will, made it on the DHS “hotlist”, while Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund didn’t.
I think everyone should send Sessions a quarter so he can call someone who cares … 1-800-WHA-AAAA.
The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund is not an “extremist group.” The White Citizens’ Council, Operation Rescue and the Klan are extremist groups. The fact that Sessions thinks that there is something “extreme” about litigation and has no problem with armed murder says a lot about the type of person he is. That there are so many Republicans who support him says a lot about the ethics and (lack of) values of the Republican party.