Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who will in all likelihood take over the Senate Judiciary Committee from Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) in 2011, said earlier today that the Alabama senator's past controversial statements--the NAACP is "un-American," the Klan are "OK" except for their pot smoking, and other gems--won't be of any concern.

The reason it won't come up is because he has been a member of the committee for a long period of time. And he's showed a great deal of impartiality. And he doesn't hold any of those views--I don't know if he ever held any of those views--but if he did he's never done anything in all the years he's been in the Senate to demonstrate any sort of affiliation with any past statements he made. He's been totally impartial, totally representing his people, and he had a record as Attorney General of that state before he came to the United States Senate to be a person who believed in the law and the enforcement of the law.

As I noted yesterday, when Sessions was a federal prosecutor in Alabama, his commitment to the "enforcement of the law" wasn't so much "impartial" as skewed in a way that adversely affected communities in the state's "Black Belt."

In fairness, though, that was more than 20 years ago. Since then, Sessions has taken a strong stance against filibustering Supreme Court nominees, and his positions on hot button, race-related issues such as immigration, drug sentencing, and voting rights, are in line with those of most Southern Republicans in Congress. That's the more recent record he brings to the ranking member seat on the Judiciary Committee. But the development carries a lot of symbolic weight--people still remember that history vividly, and yet the Republicans decided to make him, for all intents and purposes, the party's spokesman on those issues anyway.