A DECENT MAN – AT 11:58 A.M. ET:   RealClearPolitics runs an extraordinarily fine piece on the smear campaign being mounted against Senator Jeff Sessions, who is President-elect Trump's choice to be attorney general:

Let’s stipulate upfront that the Senate battle over Jeff Sessions’ nomination for U.S. attorney general is not about Jeff Sessions. Everybody knows this. Everybody also knows the Senate is going to confirm Sessions. No, the opposition to Alabama’s senator is about two things: One, the left’s reflexive opposition to all things Donald Trump. Two, the left’s prep work for the next confirmation battle over Trump’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The fight over Sessions’ confirmation to head the Justice Department is spring training, a preseason tune-up for the regular season, i.e., the confirmation showdown with Senate Democrats over Trump’s pick for the high court.

Everybody knows this, because most everybody in the Senate knows Sessions. He’s been there for 20 years. He hasn’t used – is not using – the Senate as a steppingstone to something greater. He has a record. His colleagues have worked with him. He gets along with most of them, Republican and Democrat. Consider, for example, Sessions’s work on behalf of crime victims. As law professors Paul Cassell and Steven Twist recently pointed out, Sessions worked with California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and the late-Sen. Ted Kennedy in this important area.

All of which makes the left’s opposition to this good and decent man ultimately counter-productive for Democrats. The efforts to cast Sessions as some kind of closet KKK admirer who also opposes the nation’s disabled children is just so predictable. Their ritualized “Borking” has lost its sting. The public has become inoculated to it. “In Jeff Sessions’ America …” We’ve been there, done that over these last ugly decades.

COMMENT:  Sessions, a serious man, will make a fine attorney general.  And we hope he de-politicizes a Justice Department that has been a political hotbed during the Obama years.

December 18, 2016