From the indispensable Facing South, published by the Institute for Southern Studies:

There’s more than a little irony in some of the questioning U.S. Sen. Jefferson Beauregard “Jeff” Sessions III has subjected Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor to during this week’s confirmation hearings.

The Alabama Republican — the top GOP member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a former prosecutor and state attorney general — has led the charge for his party, raising concerns about Sotomayor’s impartiality…

But what of Sessions’ own racial impartiality? After all, his 1986 nomination by President Ronald Reagan for a federal judgeship was killed by the Senate Judiciary Committee over his history of racist actions and comments.

Facing South then lists some comments Sessions made over the years, which had been pulled together earlier by The New Republic:

He criticized the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union as “un-American” and “Communist-inspired” and said they “forced civil rights down the throats of people.”

He called a white civil rights attorney a “disgrace to his race” for litigating voting rights cases.

He once said he used to think Ku Klux Klan members were “OK” until he found out some of them were “pot smokers.”