In what is reportedly an unprecedented move, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker will testify against colleague Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions in his confirmation for Attorney General.
The junior Senator from New Jersey, who is a Stanford, Oxford and Yale Law School alumnus, has served in the U.S. Senate for three years.
“This would be the first time in Senate history that a sitting senator will testify against another sitting senator for a Cabinet post during a confirmation,” CNN reports.
In a written statement, Booker specifically noted that his opposition to Sessions stems in part from Sessions’ opposition to so-called “criminal justice reform” proposals.
Conservative Review’s Daniel Horowitz reported last year that during a May 2016 town hall, “Booker admitted that criminal justice reform is needed to make sure criminal get to vote in swing states. [Booker] singled out ‘states like Florida,'” Horowitz wrote. Yet Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke has described the Booker-backed proposals as a “social engineering experiment” that will disproportionately hurt minority communities.
“When that social engineering experiment goes bad, you know who is on the receiving end of that more so than anybody else?” Clarke said last year. “My people: Black people. Brown people. Young people.”
Booker also cited Sessions’ opposition to so-called “immigration reform” as cause for Booker’s concern— by “immigration reform” Booker is referring to Sessions’ opposition to amnesty and flooding the labor market with foreign workers.
Yet Sessions’ position on immigration is inspired by the legacy of civil rights heroine and late-Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, who famously argued for immigration reduction in order to protect job and wage opportunity of African American workers.
Harvard Professor George Borjas has shown that large-scale immigration has disproportionately impacted black workers. “As immigrants disproportionately increased the supply of workers in a particular skill group, the wage of black workers in that group fell, the employment rate declined, and the incarceration rate rose,” Borjas has written.
Ironically, polling data suggests that black voters support Sessions’ pro-American worker agenda of implementing common sense immigration control rather than Booker’s support for the corporatist open borders agenda.
Despite the smears peddled by Sessions’ partisan opponents, a review of the record shows that Sessions has spent five decades as a champion of civil rights and is now the intellectual architect of a new civil rights agenda to help unemployed African Americans into good-paying jobs. All major allegations of racial insensitivity against Sessions from three decades ago have been disproven, discredited, or debunked.
As a result of Sessions’ excellent record, he has been endorsed by some of the most prominent African American leaders in his home state of Alabama— including top Democrats. He has also been endorsed by prominent national African American leaders including Sen. Tim Scott, Condoleezza Rice, and former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson. On Monday, a group of black pastors “criticized African-American opponents… for demonizing” Sessions “instead of characterizing him as someone who shows ‘respect and care for people of all races,'” USA Today reports.
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