MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

(Photo: Jackman Chiu)

Earlier this month, two protesters received three-day jail sentences for conducting a sit-in at Jeff Sessions' office on January 10, during the attorney general's confirmation hearing. The activists are members of Democracy Spring, a grassroots organization that focuses on democracy and political equality. A recent email from Democracy Spring states:

Kai Newkirk and Tania Maduro plead guilty to one count of unlawful entry.... The two were part of an eight-person peaceful protest calling on Sessions to withdraw his nomination for the position of Attorney General. This was the same Senate Confirmation hearing where then Sen. Sessions lied under oath to Sen. Al Franken, saying he "did not have communications with the Russians."

Newkirk, who served his jail time, noted in an email that it's ironic that his actions, which harmed no one, are the ones being punished:

This sentence serves as a very small reminder of the urgency of this moment of crisis for our democracy and our nation. Jeff Sessions perjured himself, lying under oath about a matter as profoundly important as the apparent interference into our election by an authoritarian foreign government. Yet he remains in the position of our nation's chief law enforcement officer, while peaceful action to defend our democracy is met with arrest and jail time. The integrity of the law has been undermined. Sessions should resign and be charged with perjury.

A video of the January 10 protest can be found on Facebook.

The fact that Sessions remains in office is indeed unjust. I wrote a commentary earlier this week headlined, "Jeff Sessions Should Resign Based on His Record, Regardless of Russian Conversations." Sessions' perjury before Congress is actually of second concern to his appalling record and statements on civil rights and civil liberties. Remember that Sessions had such a deplorable record in these areas that he was not confirmed to a federal judgeship in 1986.

Progressive protesters get jail time for "trespassing" or not complying quickly enough with a police order -- among other justifications -- but a racist bigwig gets a free pass to become the top law enforcement officer in the land. At the time of the 1986 Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, Coretta Scott King bluntly stated in a letter to Congress:

The irony of Mr. Sessions’ nomination is that, if confirmed, he will be given a life tenure for doing with a federal prosecution what the local sheriffs accomplished twenty years ago with clubs and cattle prods.

Now Sessions can apply his racist prosecutorial approach to the entire nation. In fact, he has already been doing it: He's rolling back voting rights protections and taking steps to weaken federal assurances of equality for all those in the United States. Meanwhile, the act of peacefully protesting Sessions can result in jail time.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. The momentum toward criminalizing protest is so bad that the Georgia legislature, as detailed in a March 17 Truthout article, is considering a bill that could legally define some forms of protest as "domestic terrorism." Azadeh Shahshahani, legal and advocacy director of Atlanta-based Project South, told Free Speech Radio News that the proposed legislation "widely expands the definition of domestic terrorism in a way that would allow law enforcement to target groups of citizens who demonstrate in public places." Shahshahani went on to state:

So, for one thing, it vaguely suggests that efforts to advance any belief could be categorized under a new definition of domestic terrorism. It also broadens the definition of terroristic threats to include actions "with the purpose of otherwise causing serious public inconvenience." The concern is there is no clear definition of a public inconvenience and there's no clarity on who or what agency gets to define what this entails. Obviously, we are concerned that this bill will be used as a mechanism to further crack down on the rights of people who want to exercise their First Amendment right to protest.

All efforts to reduce First Amendment rights must be vigorously resisted. Civil disobedience will continue to play a vital role in leading us through the treacherous waters of the Trump administration.