So let's do the math -- in just a week as a Democrat, Specter voted against Obama's budget, said he wouldn't be a loyal Democrat, came out against Obama's health care plan, reiterated his opposition to EFCA, and said he's rooting for the Minnesota courts to overturn the will of the voters and re-seat Republican Norm Coleman.
But it's clear that his body is rejecting his (D) transplant, because he keeps rejecting any semblance of respect or appreciation for his new party.
Sen. Arlen Specter said Tuesday he regrets his vote against Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) two decades ago that helped kill his nomination to the federal bench.
Sessions, who has now assumed Specter's former position as the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 to be a federal judge — but Specter provided a key "no" vote after allegations were made that Sessions had a poor record on race relations as Alabama attorney general. Sessions has called those allegations false and unfounded.
Some of those "allegations" about the racist Sessions:
Senate Democrats tracked down a career Justice Department employee named J. Gerald Hebert, who testified, albeit reluctantly, that in a conversation between the two men Sessions had labeled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU ) "un-American" and "Communist-inspired." Hebert said Sessions had claimed these groups "forced civil rights down the throats of people." In his confirmation hearings, Sessions sealed his own fate by saying such groups could be construed as "un-American" when "they involve themselves in promoting un-American positions" in foreign policy. Hebert testified that the young lawyer tended to "pop off" on such topics regularly, noting that Sessions had called a white civil rights lawyer a "disgrace to his race" for litigating voting rights cases. Sessions acknowledged making many of the statements attributed to him but claimed that most of the time he had been joking, saying he was sometimes "loose with [his] tongue." He further admitted to calling the Voting Rights Act of 1965 a "piece of intrusive legislation," a phrase he stood behind even in his confirmation hearings....
Another damaging witness--a black former assistant U.S. Attorney in Alabama named Thomas Figures--testified that, during a 1981 murder investigation involving the Ku Klux Klan, Sessions was heard by several colleagues commenting that he "used to think they [the Klan] were OK" until he found out some of them were "pot smokers." Sessions claimed the comment was clearly said in jest. Figures didn't see it that way. Sessions, he said, had called him "boy" and, after overhearing him chastise a secretary, warned him to "be careful what you say to white folks." Figures echoed Hebert's claims, saying he too had heard Sessions call various civil rights organizations, including the National Council of Churches and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, "un-American." Sessions denied the accusations but again admitted to frequently joking in an off-color sort of way. In his defense, he said he was not a racist, pointing out that his children went to integrated schools and that he had shared a hotel room with a black attorney several times.
Despite the "some of my best friends are black" defense, that Republican-dominated Senate committee had every reason to reject Sessions. That of all his votes in 40+ years, this is the one he picks out as the one he regrets most is bizarre, to say the least. That he says it now that he's supposedly a Democrat is yet another poke in the eye of his new party's electorate.
He's just begging for that primary challenge.
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