As a federal prosecutor, Sessions conducted a tenuous criminal investigation into voting rights advocates that registered African-Americans to vote -- an investigation that culminated in an unsuccessful prosecution against a former aide to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He once quipped that he "used to think [the KKK] were OK" until he found out some of them were "pot smokers;" and he routinely referred to an African-American attorney who worked for him as "boy" -- even once warning that attorney to "be careful what you say to white folks" after Sessions overheard him chastising a white secretary.

Moreover, Sessions remains unrepentant for these incidents, although he did reluctantly concede at his confirmation hearing that it "probably was wrong" when he attacked the NAACP as an "un-American" and "Communist-inspired" organizations that "forced civil rights down the throats of people." [See video above]]

Sessions' assault on Sotomayor and PRLDEF has largely been met with skepticism -- New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, for example, commented that "[o]nly in Washington could someone's many years of volunteer service to a highly regarded nonprofit organization that has done so much good for so many be twisted into a negative" -- and its puzzling that conservatives permitted Sessions to be the public face of their opposition to the first Latina nominated to the Supreme Court. Sessions' anti-PRLDEF campaign is not only baseless; it is reminiscent of his decades-old comments about the NAACP that kept him off the federal bench years ago.

(Emphasis supplied.) Speaking for me only