This coming week is a big one in Washington, D.C. The Republican majority is going to try to ram through a bunch of things quickly in hopes that we don’t notice some of the truly nasty things they want us to swallow. Keep watch, and call your representatives on things that you think they should oppose (or support). Here is a good guide to effectively doing this (I also follow Emily Ellsworth on Twitter). Contact information for the U.S. Senate is here. I am calling my senators on this one and hope you will call yours, too.

Senator Jeff Sessions is a bad choice for U.S. Attorney General. You may have heard about him being nominated as a Federal judge in 1986, but that his appointment was voted down (in a Republican-dominated Senate!) because he had some racist baggage in his history. That’s a cloud a person should be able to shed in three succeeding decades. But he hasn’t—witness his cozy relationship with the white supremacist’s (sometimes termed “alt-right”) site Breitbart.  Conservative columnist Rich Lowry takes the 30-yr-old failed hearings on as the only factor in the forthcoming confirmation hearings. It’s not. Here is a fairly comprehensive list, and I think in totality it is disqualifying.

To me what is most telling is that Sessions not only doesn’t know what sexual assault is, he excused Trump’s horrific taped statements describing it, trying to minimize it as just “very improper language.” Further: “When Sessions was asked in an interview whether the behavior Trump described in the video could be characterized as sexual assault, he replied, “I don’t characterize that as sexual assault. I think that’s a stretch.” But it’s not a stretch. The Department of Justice, which Sessions is now tapped to lead, defines sexual assault as “any type of sexual contact or behavior that occurs without the explicit consent of the recipient.”“ (Janet Walsh’s whole article is worth reading.)

Add things like this: “He voted against the 2013 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act” and  “He’s repeatedly worked to block NSA privacy reforms, including the mild reforms put in place under the USA Freedom Act.”  There’s a bunch more on the list—take your pick and see if this is someone you want as Attorney General. I think it’s likely that we’d see erosions of rights all over the place if this guy is put in charge.

We need someone who credibly gets us away from the racism, bigotry, misogyny, etc. of the 2016 campaign and works effectively for all Americans in this job. Here’s the job description from Google: “The attorney general is head of the u.s. justice department and chief law officer of the federal government. He or she represents the United States in legal matters generally and gives advice and opinions to the president and to other heads of executive departments as requested.”

I have no confidence that Senator Sessions can impartially uphold the laws of the land and provide satisfactory guidance to the rest of the Federal government on those laws.