WASHINGTON - U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions faced a second day of confirmation hearings Wednesday as President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for attorney general, including testimony against him by a fellow sitting senator.
Senator Cory Booker appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee in an unprecedented move that he said was prompted by "the immense powers of the attorney general combined with the deeply troubling views of this nominee." Booker said Sessions' "record says we can't count on him."
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House members John Lewis and Cedric Richmond were among those who testified.
Some Democrats are concerned that Sessions, as the nation's top law enforcement official, will not uphold civil rights laws. They point to allegations that Sessions made racist remarks in the past — remarks that, 30 years ago, resulted in the Senate's rejection of his nomination to be a federal judge. He was alleged, for example, to have called an African-American lawyer "boy" and to have referred to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, one of the nation's foremost civil rights groups, as "un-American."
"It wasn't accurate then, it isn't accurate now," Sessions told the lawmakers. He said he "understands the history of civil rights and the horrendous impact that relentless and systematic discrimination and the denial of voting rights has had on our African-American brothers and sisters."
The country, Sessions said, can never go back, and he vowed to protect equality for every citizen, including gays and transgenders — although he has voted against various bills aimed at protecting gay rights during his 20 years in the Senate.
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Demonstrators shouting anti-racist slogans at Sessions interrupted his testimony at one point and were taken out of the room.
The staunchly conservative Sessions was the first senator to endorse Trump for president but appeared to distance himself from some of Trump's public pronouncements during Tuesday's hearing.
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He promised to crack down on illegal immigration but said he was against any proposal to ban Muslim immigration to the U.S. on the basis of religion. He also said he didn't think there was a need to put Muslims who are U.S. citizens into a registry; not only would it most likely be unconstitutional, he said, but Muslim citizens should not be treated differently than anyone else.
Sessions called President Barack Obama's executive order to defer deportation for millions of undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children constitutionally questionable. He avoided a direct answer when he was asked whether he would recommend that Trump scrap the order, but said he would have "no objection" to such a move.
Sessions told the lawmakers he did not want to stop admitting refugees to the U.S., but he said there needed to be a "higher intensity of vetting" for those coming from countries known to harbor terrorists.
Contradicting Trump, Sessions said he would uphold the law against waterboarding — a tactic that mimics the sensation of drowning — when questioning terror suspects.
Sessions also testified that he "has no reason to doubt" the conclusion by U.S. intelligence that Russia meddled in the presidential election by hacking into computers to try to help Trump win.
And Sessions said he wanted to keep the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba open, calling it a secure place to hold terror suspects. Obama promised to shut down the facility by the end of his term, which ends next week.
Sessions made it clear that he was a foe of abortion rights, but recognized that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision legalizing abortion, was the law of the land, along with the 2015 ruling legalizing gay marriage.
Those pronouncements from Sessions are likely to cause dismay among some of the more conservative members of the Senate. Liberals will continue to question his civil rights record.
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