Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions’ attorney general confirmation hearing is expected to be contentious in part because he once “joked”—while discussing the case of a black man who was murdered by two members of the Ku Klux Klan—that he’d thought the KKK was “OK” until he “learned they smoked pot.” One imagines this—in addition to the other race-related controversies in Sessions’ past—inspired the protest above, which took place before his hearing began on Tuesday.
Here’s a National Journal piece (on the Atlantic’s website) about the culture of D.C. hearing protests, which are often carried out by individuals who are already well-known to Capitol police. (Hearings are open to the public, so you can’t be kept out just because you’re a known radical.)
