In November of 2014, I was assigned to write an opposition essay for my critical composition class – we had to choose a source material, something from a credible news outlet preferably, which we would then thoroughly analyze and refute using the critical thinking skills and rhetorical tools (remember all of those logical fallacies) we’d learned in class. Given my now seemingly prescient argumentative tendencies, I decided to refute what amounts to a lengthy rant on immigration published in Politico’s magazine, authored by then Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) who is now slated to serve as our 84th United States Attorney General following the resignation of current Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find the actual essay itself amid my cluttered, tattered digital records although I did come across a pre-write dated just over two years ago in which I broke down the most basic flaws I had managed to identify in Sessions’ argument. In one of my first notes I applied a label I’d recently learned in class, loaded language, to the Senator’s characterization of President Obama’s immigration policy as “open borders extremism”. I consulted other resources and tried to cite more sensible characterizations of the President’s policies, which did not seem to my seventeen-year-old self to amount in any way, shape, or form to the sort of fundamentalist open borders policy that Sessions claimed Obama was pursuing. At the time I honestly just couldn’t understand how or why a sitting U.S. Senator would make such an outrageous claim.
For the record, now with the benefit of hindsight we can actually tie a nice neat bow on the effects of Obama’s “open borders extremism” as Sessions put it – to the tune of roughly 2.5 million immigrants deported between 2009 and 2015 through immigration orders and countless more stopped at the border. That’s more deportations under Obama than any other U.S. President to date, an unprecedented feat. It’s also a record which our new Attorney General described as “open borders extremism” in 2014, while serving as a U.S. Senator.
Now I finally understand why I was so struck by the use of such reckless, inaccurate rhetoric two years ago. Senator Sessions felt the winds blowing that nobody else could see coming. He was capitalizing on the swelling populist revolt against globalization and multiculturalism which would prove to defy all conventional wisdom and has since erupted in magnificent proportions, prompting the rise of numerous far-right nationalist parties throughout Europe, Britain’s dramatic vote in a referendum to break off ties with the E.U., and the United States’ election of Donald Trump as our President – so far.
I won’t go into much detail about the racially charged remarks that led to Sessions being denied Senate confirmation in 1986 after President Reagan nominated him to serve as a federal judge, other than to say that they are worth considering and I’d highly recommend this piece by legendary NPR reporter Nina Totenberg (she first broke the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas story in 1991) chronicling the events. The editorial board of the New York Times minced no words in giving their two cents; calling the nomination of Sessions “An Insult to Justice”.
Meanwhile an opinion piece in Fox titled “Here’s why Jeff Sessions is the perfect pick for Attorney General” makes the case for Sessions, citing his previous government experience as well as the fact that he is “battle-tested”. This proves to be their best attempt at framing Sessions’ 1986 controversy, by claiming the majority Republican Senate’s choice not to confirm him was “a malicious campaign perpetrated by “left-wing activists inside the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division” who “pounded him relentlessly with trumped up accusations of racism.”
Whether you agree with the appointment of Sessions or not, the words I cited from the Fox editorial are easily recognizable as political rhetoric – cop out complaints about malicious left wing campaigns that sound almost conspiratorial and ring just as empty as the words used by our new Attorney General in the article I was refuting two years ago. It’s words like these, the ones that seem the emptiest but actually carry the most weight, that beg troubling questions about the intentions of the powerful men like Sessions who utilize them. Does he genuinely view immigration policies through a paradigm in which President Obama deporting 2.5 million people amounts to “open borders extremism”, or was he fully aware of how uncoupled his rhetoric was from reality but decided to use it nonetheless?
The way I see it, there’s an unavoidable forced dichotomy that we’re now faced with in terms of figuring out how Sessions intends to run his Justice Department – he’s either a Machiavellian political operator with amazing foresight or a genuine American nationalist who will fight to secure what he perceives to be his version of our country from the unavoidable, ever-encroaching forces of globalization and immigration. Either conclusion is troubling for its own reasons, and as of now I haven't the slightest clue where my personal opinion lands within the range of eventualities they allow for. I think only time will tell what’s truly going on inside the mind of the man scheduled to take the reins next in a long line of public servants entrusted with the responsibilities of the office of U.S. Attorney General.
