“I wish to say emphatically that this is about a principle that, like the Constitution, is bigger than politics and partisanship," Khizr Khan wrote. | Getty Khizr Khan urges Senate panel to oppose Sessions' confirmation

The Gold Star father whose feud with Donald Trump sent the president-elect’s campaign into a mid-summer tailspin is stepping into the spotlight once again, this time to oppose the confirmation of Sen. Jeff Sessions to be the next attorney general.

“I am writing to urge you, out of respect for the American values enshrined in the Constitution, not to confirm Sen. Jeff Sessions to be Attorney General of the United States,” Khizr Khan wrote in a letter to the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee released Monday by People for the American Way. “I am also well aware of the fact that the Republican Majority of this honorable Committee may confirm Sen. Sessions after an incomplete and less than thorough hearing which will compromise its moral authority in our legislative system.”


Khan took his initial turn in the political arena at the Democratic National Convention, where he delivered a scathing rebuke of Trump, telling the then-candidate that “you have sacrificed nothing.” He brought down the house at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Arena when he wondered aloud if Trump had ever read the Constitution and then offered to let the GOP nominee borrow the copy that he pulled from the breast pocket of his jacket.

In response, Trump launched a damaging feud with Khan, suggesting in one interview that his wife, who accompanied him on stage in Philadelphia, was not allowed to speak because of the family’s Muslim faith. Trump later said that the Khan family, whose son was killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq, was fair game for political attacks because it was Khizr Khan who had first criticized the now-president-elect.

Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson blamed President Barack Obama for the death of Khan’s son, even though he was killed in 2004, months before Obama was elected to the Senate. Pierson later backed away from that charge and instead blamed Hillary Clinton, who voted to authorize the Iraq War as a senator from New York.

“People around the world look to our Constitution with envy. They are inspired by its promise of equal protection of the law to everyone – not just people from powerful families, or a favored ethnic group or religious community,” Khan wrote in his letter. “I wish to say emphatically that this is about a principle that, like the Constitution, is bigger than politics and partisanship.”

In outlining his opposition to Sessions’ (R-Ala.) confirmation, Khan noted that the GOP senator was denied a federal judgeship over racism concerns in 1986, the last time he sat before a Senate confirmation hearing. He said Sessions “has not demonstrated a greater understanding that the right to vote should transcend partisan interests,” noting the Alabama senator’s criticism of the Voting Rights Act. That Sessions has been critical of the NAACP and the ACLU is further disqualifying, Khan said, evidence that “he does not understand patriotic dissent.”

Khan also wrote that Sessions has backed “proposals that would single Muslim immigrants out for discriminatory treatment,” a position the gold-star father said is “not the American way.”

“My son, U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan, was a living rebuke to such bigotry,” he wrote.