This article originally appeared on Right Wing Watch.

As a close ally and early supporter of President-elect Donald Trump, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions has recently been nominated as attorney general. His record on race is so alarming that it’s not at all surprising to see him on Trump's team.

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Sessions defended Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims from entering the United States and Trump has embraced many of Sessions’ proposals, like “canceling federal funds to sanctuary cities,” slowing legal immigration and challenging the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. In January, a top aide to Sessions, Stephen Miller, joined the Trump campaign as senior policy adviser, and Sessions’ Chief of Staff Rick Dearborn is the executive director of Trump’s transition team.

In 1986, a bipartisan majority of the Senate Judiciary Committee rejected his nomination to a federal judgeship in the midst of charges of racial bias. For example, Sessions had criticized civil rights groups as “un-American” and “Communist-inspired” and accused them of trying to “force civil rights down the throats of people.” He also dubbed a white civil rights attorney a “disgrace to his race,” according to a witness, and reportedly called a black lawyer in his office “boy.” In his confirmation hearing, he admitted to referring to the Voting Rights Act as “a piece of intrusive legislation,” and he later opposed efforts to update the landmark law.

As the New Republic chronicled, Sessions prosecuted civil rights activists for trying to register black voters while saying that he only disapproved of the Ku Klux Klan after he “found out some of them were ‘pot smokers,’” a remark he later insisted was just a joke.

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The New Republic writes: