Today in bearing witness to things that are not normal, we note that outgoing US Attorney General Loretta Lynch will be replaced with a man deemed too racist to serve as a federal judge by the US Senate in 1986. Via TPM:

Sessions’ nomination will likely be met with opposition in the Senate. While serving as a U.S. attorney in Alabama, Sessions was nominated for a federal judgeship in 1986, but he was never confirmed due to past racist comments. He withdrew his name from consideration and went on to be the Alabama attorney general and later a senator.

During the 1986 hearings to consider Sessions, J. Gerald Hebert, a Justice Department prosecutor, testified about how Sessions talked about a lawyer representing a black client. Herbert said that he once told Sessions that a judge had called a white lawyer “a disgrace to his race” for representing black clients. In response, Sessions said, “maybe he is,” Herbert said. Herbert also told Congress at the time that Sessions had called the NAACP “un-American” because the group was “trying to force civil rights down the throats of people.”

An African-American prosecutor testified to Congress that Sessions had called him “boy” and once joked that he felt the Ku Klux Klan “was O.K. until I found out they smoked pot.” Sessions denied called the prosecutor “boy” but not the other comments.

Though Sessions is likely to meet opposition from Democratic senators, it’s not clear how Republicans will approach his nomination now that he is one of their colleagues.