Sen. Jeff Sessions’ confirmation hearings for U.S. attorney general start Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Sessions once chaired. The same committee that denied him a federal judicial appointment in 1986 denied Reagan appointee Robert Bork a Supreme Court seat the next year. Already the attempted “Borking” of Sen. Sessions, R-Ala., is fully in motion. The themes are familiar.

We can almost hear the menacing chords and refrains of Neil Young’s “Southern Man” playing in the background as liberal activists trot out a defamatory portrait of a lifelong public servant and decent man who happens to hail from the Deep South, a land that many Californians view with a mixture of fear and condescension. Through this lens, every Southern white Republican man is a suspected racist until proven otherwise — itself a bigoted, outmoded and unfortunate bias on the part of self-proclaimed “progressives” who do not see the irony.

Sessions was denied the judgeship more than 30 years ago on the basis of flimsy, biased and manifestly unfair accusations, many of which were later recanted or found to be false.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is pushing to delay the hearings, saying the Senate needs more time to evaluate the colleague she has served with in the Senate for 20 years. She says Sessions has produced too much information to the committee — more than 150,000 pages of disclosures — more than 100 times as many pages as produced by Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Some of us are old enough to remember that Eric Holder (who described Sessions as a “great U.S. attorney” in 2009 hearings) was overwhelmingly confirmed by a bipartisan Senate vote a mere eight days after President Obama was sworn in.

Sessions is known by his colleagues as a man of integrity who takes the rule of law as, well — the law, for which he may not substitute his own judgment. It is not the place of the attorney general to make laws, but rather to enforce them — as Sessions did as Alabama attorney general when he prosecuted members of the Ku Klux Klan.

And as he did in Perry County, Ala., where, acting on the complaints of black voters and public officials, he investigated and unsuccessfully prosecuted other black voters for allegedly changing absentee ballots. The son of one of those prosecuted, Albert Turner Jr., rejects the smear of Sessions as a bigot: “He is not a racist. ... He was a prosecutor at the federal level with a job to do. He was presented with evidence by a local district attorney that he relied on, and his office presented the case. That’s what a prosecutor does. ... I believe that he is someone with whom I, and others in the civil rights community, can work if given the opportunity.”

Sessions has sponsored important civil rights legislation protecting vulnerable Americans with some of his most liberal peers, including the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. The laws include the Prison Rape Elimination Act (2003), the crack cocaine Fair Sentencing Act (2010) and the Finding Fugitive Sex Offenders Act (2011). Sessions voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act, an inconvenient fact for his maligners. Black Democrats from Alabama have been coming forward to publicly support Sessions on his civil rights record since he was first named by President-elect Donald Trump.

Republicans have the votes to confirm Sessions, and will do so with the help of three Democrats who have already announced their support. The only question is whether or not he will be subjected to despicable drive-by character assassination on his way to confirmation. Despite all the predictable theater surrounding this nomination, Democrats should do the right thing and swiftly vote to confirm Jeff Sessions as U.S. attorney general.

Harmeet K. Dhillon is a trial lawyer in San Francisco, and the Republican National Committeewoman from California. Twitter: @pnjaban