Jeff Sessions shows his critics were right

Jeff Sessions isn’t a racist it’s just that his policies seem to be … or something. Let’s see what Jeff did the last two days of Black History Month:

• He dropped an objection to a voter ID law in Texas:

The Republican-led Texas Legislature passed one of the toughest voter ID laws in the country in 2011, requiring voters to show a driver’s license, passport or other government-issued photo ID before casting a ballot.

The Obama administration’s Justice Department sued Texas to block the law in 2013 and scored a major victory last year after a federal appeals court ruled that the law needed to be softened because it discriminated against minority voters who lacked the required IDs.

Opponents of the law said Republican lawmakers selected IDs that were most advantageous for Republican-leaning white voters and discarded IDs that were beneficial to Democratic-leaning minority voters. For example, legislators included licenses to carry concealed handguns, which are predominantly carried by whites, and excluded government employee IDs and public university IDs, which are more likely to be used by blacks, Hispanics and Democratic-leaning younger voters.

But the Justice Department under President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions told a judge on Monday that it was withdrawing its claim that Texas enacted the law with a discriminatory intent.

but don’t worry, it’s not as if this would affect a lot of people:

Texas’ law is said to be “the nation’s strictest voter photo ID law that leaves more than half a million eligible voters who do not have the requisite types of ID from fully participating in the democratic process.” The DOJ under the Obama administration viewed the rule as draconian to the point that it unconstitutionally violated safeguards of the Voting Rights Act. A federal judge in 2014 called the law an “unconstitutional poll tax.”

and it’s not as if the Trump administration can’t be unbiased (this was before Sessions was confirmed):

 Under President Barack Obama, the Justice Department spent the better part of a decade battling a strict voter ID law in Texas, which several federal judges found to be discriminatory. Now, in the Trump era, the acting head of the department’s Civil Rights Division is a Republican attorney who offered Texas officials guidance as they wrote the disputed law.

Thomas E. Wheeler, an Indiana lawyer who previously served as general counsel to Vice President Mike Pence when Pence was governor of Indiana, was named the acting head of the Civil Rights Division this week.

• He is worried much more about the perception of the police than civil rights:

In his first speech as attorney general, Mr. Sessions did not name any specific cities, but he indicated that Justice Department scrutiny from afar was undermining the effectiveness of the police across the country. It was a clear reference to the aggressive efforts of the Obama administration to oversee law enforcement agencies charged with civil rights abuses.

“We need, so far as we can, in my view, help police departments get better, not diminish their effectiveness,” Mr. Sessions said in remarks to the National Association of Attorneys General. “And I’m afraid we’ve done some of that. So we’re going to try to pull back on this, and I don’t think it’s wrong or mean or insensitive to civil rights or human rights.”

…

“One of the big things out there that’s, I think, causing trouble and where you see the greatest increase in violence and murders in cities is somehow, some way, we undermine the respect for our police and made, oftentimes, their job more difficult,” he said.

Charles Pierce directs us to this:

Police “disappeared” more than 7,000 people at an off-the-books interrogation warehouse in Chicago, nearly twice as many detentions as previously disclosed, the Guardian can now reveal.

From August 2004 to June 2015, nearly 6,000 of those held at the facility were black, which represents more than twice the proportion of the city’s population. But only 68 of those held were allowed access to attorneys or a public notice of their whereabouts, internal police records show.

but it would hurt the perception of the police so we should ignore it.

Now that’s how you celebrate Black History Month, well if you’re a racist.