Attorney General Jeff Sessions

I’ve said before that as a proud Southerner, I struggle sometimes with being an American – and the brouhaha over Attorney General Jeff Sessions is one of many reasons why.

I really wonder how much of the Senate and Establishment media opposition to Sessions occurred simply because he was a conservative Alabamian and a Southerner. For as long as the left reigns culturally in this country, white Southerners with conservative leanings, which, frankly, represent the vast majority of these Southerners, will be expected to remain on their stools of everlasting repentance, it seems.

And as I have argued before, this really is a disgrace, especially considering the disproportionate role Southerners, particularly working-class Southerners, serve in protecting this country’s national security interests all over the world.

I think that it’s also worth pointing out that with the exception of Justice Thomas, who spent most of his life outside the South, no other Southerner sits on the Supreme Court and hasn’t for generations. Throughout most of the history of the United States, there was an attempt to maintain at least the semblance of geographical diversity on the Supreme Court.  But since 2014, the Court is composed of a majority from the Northeastern United States, with seven justices coming from states to the north and east of Washington, D.C.

The last white Southerner to serve in the U.S. Supreme Court was Justice Hugo Black of Alabama.

Shortly after Black’s passing, President Richard Nixon opens a cultural hornet’s nest when he attempted to nominate two Southerners to the Court, Clement Haynesworth of South Carolina, and G. Harrold Carswell of Georgia.