Jeff Sessions

Attorney General Jeff Sessions listens during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2017 in Washington. Sessions is leaving open the possibility that a special counsel could be appointed to look into Clinton Foundation dealings and an Obama-era uranium deal. The Justice Department made the announcement Monday in responding to concerns from Republican lawmakers. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

(Alex Brandon)

I really don't want to defend Jeff Session, but I must.

However, before I get into what he's doing right, let me get through all the things he's doing wrong.

Marijuana.

More than 30 states have legalized cannabis in some form or fashion, and guess what happened? Not a thing. Certainly, there's a learning process. Since complete legalization took effect, Colorado has had to take steps to protect children from edible forms of marijuana, but the benefits of legalization there (including a new source of state revenue) have outweighed the risks, and the rest of us have been left to ask, what were we really doing all this time?

It was only after Coloradans lit up that the smoke began to clear. The war on drugs has largely been a failure -- conscripting petty criminals into a system that alienates and hardens them, that does as much to ruin lives and destroy families as the controlled substances themselves. But the criminalization of marijuana has been the greatest misstep, taking a relatively harmless drug and turning it, not into a gateway to other drugs (which it never was any more than alcohol) but rather, a gateway to prison. The rationale was nothing but fear.

No matter, Jeff Sessions is still against it. This week he rescinded an Obama-era policy for the federal government to look the other way while states experimented with better policies.

Civil Asset Forfeiture.

This is a tough-on-crime policy that essentially allows law enforcement to take your stuff without due process of law. Ostensibly, this was meant to allow law enforcement to crack down on drug kingpins, but what it really did was give those agencies a way to enrich themselves at the expense of civil liberties.

Last year, AL.com reporter Chris Harress exposed how the south Alabama town of Castleberry had taken the leap from speed trap to highway robbery -- taking drivers' property and money without ever charging them with crimes.

Civil liberties groups -- both conservative and liberal -- have decried the practice and called for it to be outlawed.

But not Jeff Sessions. He wants to expand it.

Sentencing guidelines

While even ardent conservatives have come around to the realization that mandatory minimums took discretion out of the hands of judges and filled prisons unnecessarily, Sessions has argued in favor of those policies.

And in what's becoming a theme of his tenure at the Justice Department, Sessions seeks to rescind and repeal almost everything the Obama administration did, no matter the rationale behind those initiatives -- including guidance to state and local jurisdictions, telling them that it's unconstitutional to jail someone when they are unable to pay a fine.

Jeff Sessions' only approach to crime is to incarcerate as many people as possible, even if it's just for being poor.

Stuck on stubborn

Jeff Sessions would have made a pretty typical attorney general 25 years ago. The policies he advocates were popular in the early 1990s, but most of them have been tested since then and many found to create their own, new problems.

The prudent thing to do would be to evaluate where we are now and adjust accordingly, but Sessions is bent on taking us back in time and trying the experiment again with the expectation of some different -- or perhaps, indifferent -- result.

It shouldn't be any surprise then that DC lawmakers are calling for Sessions to step aside or be fired, except they've seized on all the wrong reasons -- really, the only wrong reason.

In an op-ed in Washington Examiner, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-N.C., and Rep. Mark Meadows, R-Ohio, called for Sessions to resign or be fired for ... recusing himself from an investigation in which he might find himself a related party, or maybe even a target.

It's these two chuckleheads who've put me again in the position of defending someone I disagree with 90 percent of the time.

Despite prying guilty pleas from Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos, and despite convincing a grand jury to indict Paul Manafort and Rick Gates -- Jordan and Meadows call all of this Russia stuff "hysteria." And they blame Sessions for it.

Despite Robert Mueller keeping the grand jury hermetically sealed to the press, even keeping Papadopoulos' guilty plea secret from the press for months, the two Freedom caucus members blamed Sessions for leaks to the press.

But they aren't the only ones. Meadows and Jordan, it seems, are only doing their master's bidding. The New York Times reported Friday that, not only was Trump unhappy that Sessions recused himself from the case, but he had also ordered his White House counsel to stop Sessions from doing so.

Sessions did it anyway -- a move he made out of professional principle and a dedication to the rule of law.

And God bless him for it, because it seems he's the only person holding the line between democracy and a Banana Republic autocracy.

Sessions, it would seem, is immovable in more ways than one.

Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group. You can follow his work on Facebook through Reckon by AL.com.