Georgetown Law School Takes A Knee Against AG Sessions (TWEETS)

Attorney General Jeff Sessions was at Georgetown Law School this week to give a scheduled talk on campus free speech, and boy did the students and faculty there have opinions about that. In an homage to NFL players protesting police mistreatment, both faculty and students took a knee outside Georgetown University Law Center to protest both Sessions’ and President Donald Trump’s hypocrisy regarding freedom of speech.

More than 30 Georgetown Law faculty members also signed a letter where they called out the Attorney General’s prosecution of a woman who laughed during his confirmation hearing, and expressed outrage over Trump’s condemnation of professional athletes expressing their first amendment rights while calling white supremacists “very fine people.” The letter went on to read:

“These are just three examples of governmental action antithetical to freedom of speech and association for which Attorney General Sessions is either closely affiliated or directly responsible… A man who fails to recognize paradigmatic violations of the First Amendment is a poor choice to speak about free speech on campuses.”

The professors also made note of Jeff Sessions’ spotty civil rights record, in particular voting rights, Islamic versus domestic extremism, DACA, and police shootings of unarmed black men. Sessions has also been a strong proponent of voter ID laws which disproportionately affects minority voters.

To back up everything the faculty and students were protesting, Attorney General Sessions used his time at the microphone to defend Donald Trump’s atrocious statements about NFL athletes and then said that freedom of speech on college campuses is in danger. The lecture hall where Sessions spoke was not filled to, as many students were not allowed to attend the speech. A student protestor noted:

“It’s incredibly ironic that the attorney general wants to come here to talk about free speech but is excluding dissenting voices and potentially dissenting questions from his speech.”

Not exactly the most popular man in his profession, it would seem.

Feature image via YouTube screengrab.