Unsuited to Serve

Amid rising concern about President Reagan’s effort to pack the federal judiciary with ideologically pure judges, the nomination of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III to a judgeship in Alabama is now before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The White House could not have made a worse selection if it had set out to do so.

Sessions, you see, who is the U.S. attorney in Mobile, Ala., has a history of making statements indicating that he is not fit for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench. For example, he has called the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union “un-American” and “communist-inspired” because they want to “force civil rights down the throats of people.”

Of the Ku Klux Klan he once said, “I used to think they’re OK” until discovering that some were “pot smokers.” And he once agreed with someone else’s remark that a white civil-rights lawyer was “a disgrace to his race.” The Voting Rights Act to Sessions is “an intrusive piece of legislation.”

And what is Sessions’ explanation for these statements? “I am loose with my tongue on occasion,” he told the Judiciary Committee last week, where Democratic Sens. Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.), Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), Howard M. Metzenbaum (Ohio) and Paul Simon (Ill.) are keeping his feet to the fire.

Sessions now tries to minimize those statements and explain them away as mere jokes or off-hand remarks. The senators must decide for themselves what he really believes. This is no witch hunt or effort to impose a liberal litmus test on a President’s judicial nominees. The American Bar Assn. gave the 38-year-old Sessions its lowest rating, “qualified,” and a minority report found him “unqualified” for the bench.

Most of Reagan’s judicial appointments have been people with impressive credentials regardless of their ideologies. Sessions is a different story.He has shown that he is temperamentally unsuited to judge cases in the Southern District of Alabama, 44% of whose population is black. If the nomination is not withdrawn, it should be defeated in committee or on the Senate floor.