Al Sharpton: Sessions as attorney general ‘a nightmare’

The Rev. Al Sharpton says Americans cannot afford Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) serving as President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general.

“To have Sen. Sessions as attorney general is a nightmare we cannot wake up from,” he said during a Friday press call with other civil rights leaders, according to the Washington Examiner.

The NAACP’s president, meanwhile, said his organization mainly opposes Sessions over his record on voting rights.

{mosads}“[Sessions] supported the weakening [of] a key provision of the Voting Rights Act,” Cornell Williams Brooks said. “[He] is the worst possible nominee to serve as attorney general [of] the United States.”

A Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights spokesman said Sessions’s “record on civil and human rights makes him simply unfit to be the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.”

“His conduct so far demonstrates a fundamental disregard of the office of attorney general,” Wade Henderson said, referencing the depth of Sessions’s initial Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire.

Sessions, who was once a Senate Judiciary Committee member, will face his former colleagues in confirmation hearings scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday.

The Alabama lawmaker has emerged as one of Trump’s most polarizing Cabinet picks.

Critics question Sessions’s record on issues including civil rights, criminal justice reform and immigration.

Supporters have countered such attacks as scaremongering that ignores his work protecting civil and voting rights as Alabama’s former attorney general.

The confirmation fight has also placed fresh scrutiny on Sessions’s failed bid to become a U.S. District Court judge in 1986.

Sessions’s nomination was withdrawn after witnesses testified that he had made racially charged remarks, such as calling the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union “un-American.” Allies of Sessions have called that testimony a “smear campaign.”

Republicans who have served alongside Sessions in the Senate have praised him and say they are confident he will be confirmed.