Jeff Sessions, Immigration, and “States’ Rights”

(Letter)

2 April 2018

To the Editor

In reading the fine article “Stop All Deportations” in WV No. 1130, I noted that it did not address the glaring hypocrisy of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a staunch advocate of “states’ rights,” using the federal government to attack the sanctuary laws of the state of California. Granted, dealing with even a small portion of the hypocrisy of the Trump administration would require a substantial expansion of WV’s format. “States’ rights” was of course the rallying cry of the Confederacy. Using the plural was actually disingenuous since the only “right” they were interested in was the “right” to own slaves. Adding another level of hypocrisy, many of the “states’ rights” mob are Bible-thumpers. However, the Bible decrees that every fiftieth year all slaves are to be freed and all debt cancelled, known as the jubilee year. John Brown’s favorite hymn was “Blow Ye the Trumpet, Blow,” the chorus of which proclaimed “The year of jubilee is come!” Being a righteous Bible-thumper, Brown believed that chattel slavery was an abomination before his God, and took truly heroic action based on his belief. Sessions’ lawsuits make it clear that these latter-day Confederates are only for “states’ rights” for states which act to ramp up racial oppression, anti-immigrant hysteria and other forms of bigotry, and not for those that do so much as feign the opposite, like California.

Jeffrey Schanzer