By David Cole
Under almost any other circumstances, the firing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions would be a moment for dancing in the streets. Sessions oversaw a Justice Department that systematically undermined civil liberties and civil rights.
But his departure portends no improvement on these fronts. And the fact that President Trump fired him, notwithstanding his faithful advancement of the president’s agenda, should raise alarm bells.
Sessions leaves the Justice Department far less committed to justice than he found it. Under President Barack Obama, the department expanded the rights of LGBTQ individuals, responded aggressively to police abuse, directed federal prosecutors to use their charging discretion wisely to reduce mass incarceration, promoted voting rights, reduced reliance on private prisons and commuted lengthy sentences imposed on nonviolent drug offenders. Sessions could not reincarcerate the men and women whose sentences Obama commuted, but he reversed virtually everything else.
Instead of protecting the most vulnerable among us, the Justice Department under Sessions targeted them. One of his earliest actions was to rescind a guidance requiring schools to allow transgender students to use the bathroom associated with their gender identity. In then-ongoing litigation, he abandoned the department’s long-standing position that Texas’s voter-ID law was racially discriminatory. He sought to back out of a consent decree with the Baltimore Police 
Department requiring it to reform its civil rights violations, and issued a memo as he was leaving the office that radically curtails the federal government’s ability to impose reform on abusive police departments nationwide. He directed federal prosecutors to pursue the most severe charges possible against criminal defendants, regardless of mitigating circumstances. He reversed 20 years of consistent Justice Department policy to support an Ohio practice of purging voters from the rolls for failing to vote.
Sessions reserved his most egregious actions, however, for immigrants — a group that cannot defend itself through the political process because they cannot vote. He defended Trump’s travel ban, which barred entrance to the United States to tens of thousands of people from predominantly Muslim countries. He imposed quotas on immigration judges, which the judges themselves have said make it impossible to provide fair hearings to those whose cases they are adjudicating. He made it harder for victims of rape and gang violence to obtain asylum in the United States. He sought to punish cities and towns that chose, as is their right under the Constitution, to leave immigration enforcement to the federal government. He was a vocal proponent of ending protection for “dreamers,” the young undocumented people to whom Obama granted relief from deportation. (A federal court of appeals ruled Thursday that the decision to rescind protection was arbitrary and unlawful.) And 
perhaps most cruelly of all, he promoted and defended Trump’s family separation policy, in which young children were forcibly taken from their parents for months at a time, often without even accounting for where the children were sent and held, as a way of deterring immigration to the United States.
So from the standpoint of those most in need of justice, Sessions will not be missed. But he did do the right thing in standing up to the president on an issue even more fundamental to our constitutional system: the principle that no one is above the law.
Sessions properly recused himself from overseeing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign — because, as a member of the campaign himself, he had to. Trump never forgave Sessions for his refusal to put personal loyalty to Trump over his professional obligation to the law. But that is what our system demands. And there is every indication that Sessions’s acting successor, Matthew G. Whitaker, was selected precisely because, unlike Sessions, he will do Trump’s bidding in obstructing the Mueller investigation.
As important as civil rights and civil liberties are, there are some values that are even more fundamental. The rule of law holds that everyone must be subject to the law’s dictates, that no one is above the law and that no one can be the judge in his own case. That’s why Sessions, on the advice of ethics lawyers in the Justice Department, recused himself from the Mueller investigation. And it was that fidelity to law over personal loyalty to Trump that the president could not abide.
The president has now fired an FBI director and an attorney general for the same reason: They would not do his personal bidding and halt a criminal investigation into his own campaign’s wrongdoing. If Whitaker chooses a different path, it won’t be only civil liberties and civil rights that are at stake; it will be our constitutional democracy.
David Cole is national legal director of the ACLU and a professor at Georgetown University Law Center.
“Sessions leaves the Justice Department far less committed to justice than he found it.”
Doubtful. I can attest from recent observation that field agents are no less committed to doing their jobs.
Sessions was an opportunistic milk-toast who didn’t do much of anything besides posturing. Thinking he might avoid the upcoming prosecution of Trumpists, he recused himself from the Russia investigation, but for nought since he subsequent;y lied under oath to congress. His relationship with Mueller may be getting much closer, now that he has to start covering his own behind.
I believe you speak much truth…
The new interim appointment makes me wish Sessions was still on-board… may even be an non-constitutional, unlawful, appointment…
Some of the Trumpist, Republican faithful, should suggest to POTUS, “when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging”… as far as I’m concerned, POTUS can keep digging, at least to a six-foot depth…
Then, privately fund the folk to replace the dirt…
Disagree completely with this article. Most of the “human rights” enumerated are partisan political views which change from administration to administration. The assertion that claims of domestic violence alone provide a “human right” to asylum is of course absurd. It would have been interesting is the author had provided a list of other countries that recognize that “human right”.
Sessions, if remembered at all, will be known for his refusal to yield on a principle despite unprecedented public humiliation from the president. I think it’s safe to say that no other senior official has ever endured such public abuse from the president. I would be interested if anyone can cite anything remotely similar.
I don’t think we’ve ever had a such a misanthropic and mendacious narcissist in the office before. Sessions’ motives for taking the job in the first place aren’t clear to me unless Trump had something on him. As Trump self-destructs he is taking so many of his closest allies down as if in a reality show, but here we all are at risk. It’s time to tell him to go.
Dream on Trump haters. It’s becoming more apparant everyday that Trump won’t leave office until sometime in January 2025. Mueller has nothing on him, so far $38 million down the drain for basically nothing but the TDS of the Trump haters.
Agree Keith. This was a brilliant and expected move by Trump after the election. Liberals treated Sessions like crap and now he is their victim and hero.
And they wonder why they cannot get any traction in elections.
The Mueller clown show is like a drug for the losing left. They cannot break the habit even though there is nothing left but emptiness and harm. Trump is helping liberals kick the habit and get on with their lives.
I hope Trey Gowdy takes the job.
” Liberals treated Sessions like crap and now he is their victim and hero.”
No. In fact, I think this article sums up very well:
“Under almost any other circumstances, the firing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions would be a moment for dancing in the streets. Sessions oversaw a Justice Department that systematically undermined civil liberties and civil rights.
But his departure portends no improvement on these fronts. And the fact that President Trump fired him, notwithstanding his faithful advancement of the president’s agenda, should raise alarm bells.”
David, as a conservative I too wanted Jeff Sessions gone. You think he was doing the bidding of Trump and maybe he was on some fronts, but there’s so many other issues he never addressed that needed to be.
Believe me, from reading articles and comments from many news sources conservatives were not happy with Sessions.
And Jeff is right, Democrats hated Sessions and now they’re defending him.
I don’t agree that Democrats are defending Sessions. I think there are a few factors here. First, they don’t think him going is going to be an improvement. Second, they see him going as a ploy to get rid of Mueller. The person who is being defended here is Mueller, not Sessions. Can you show me an actual quote from the left where Session is being defended? I think Cole’s view is common, actual defense, I haven’t seen.
Trey Gowdy would be great.
Keith, it should be obvious even to you that Trump is running scared, employing Mafia tactics trying to protect himself. And while Justice doesn’t prosecute sitting presidents, that immunity doesn’t cover their family. We know Cohen can put Trump jr in the cross-hairs for the Trump Tower meeting and the lie to cover it up. Flynn puts Jared Kushner in meetings with Kislyak to set up up a back-channel communications link with the Kremlin.
And it’s better than even money bet that the new congress will have an impeachment bill ready to rock and roll, whether the spineless Republicans in the senate will convict or not.
Johnny my boy, say it out loud with me, Trump is going to be around another 6 years as your POTUS. The sooner you come to grips with that reality the better off you will be. You’re hoping for something that’s just not there and not going to happen.