Sessions

Jeff Sessions, a Lifelong Outsider, Finds the Inside Track

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/08/us/politics/jeff-sessions-attorney-general.html?_r=0&utm_source=jolt&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Jolt%201/10/2017&utm_term=Jolt

Excerpt: To Alabama voters, weary of decades of Democratic back-scratching and scandals, Mr. Sessions seemed a breath of fresh air when he emerged on the political scene in 1994, after 12 years as the top federal prosecutor in Mobile. As the state’s attorney general, his first elective post, he slashed staff, pay, travel, cars and supplies. Republican leaders hoped he would come to the rescue of the former governor, Guy Hunt, who was removed from office after a 1993 ethics conviction. Instead, Mr. Sessions asked a federal appeals court to uphold the conviction. … After he was elected senator, taking a seat on the same Judiciary Committee that denied him the judgeship, Mr. Sessions seemed to bear no grudge against those who had humiliated him in 1986. He collaborated with Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts on a bill to reduce prison rape. He also worked with Democrats to correct sentencing disparities that resulted in harsher penalties for those convicted of crimes involving crack cocaine, who were predominately black, than those convicted of powder cocaine, who were more likely to be white.