Democrats risk being rejected further by American voters if they fiercely battle Sen. Jeff Sessions during the confirmation process for attorney general, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said Friday.
"If the Democrats want to continue to dig the hole that they're in, let them do this," DeLay, 69, the Texas Republican who was majority leader from 2003 to 2005, told Brooke Baldwin on CNN. "The American people will reject them and reject their whole premise that any time you criticize anybody you're a racist.
"That's not Jeff Sessions — and it's not the Jeff Sessions that I know."
President-elect Donald Trump said Friday that he would nominate Sessions, 69, the four-term Alabama senator, as attorney general after he is inaugurated in January.
Sessions, a former United States attorney and Alabama attorney general, must be confirmed by the Senate.
Democrats are expected to challenge Sessions on several alleged racially charged issues, including his withdrawal for nomination for a federal judgeship by President Ronald Reagan in 1986.
Sessions was dogged during the process by racist comments he allegedly made as U.S. attorney in Alabama.
He was said to have called a black assistant U.S. attorney "boy" and the NAACP "un-American" and "Communist-inspired."
The senator denied making the statements.
"If they want to continue down the road that the American people have rejected, so be it," DeLay told Baldwin about any possible Democratic opposition to Sessions. "They'll suffer the consequences."
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