No laughing in the kingdom

The Feds are prosecuting a woman for laughing during Jeff Sessions’s confirmation hearing.

During Jeff Sessions’ confirmation hearings, Senator Richard Selby claimed that the North Carolina senator’s history of “treating all Americans equally under the law is clear and well-documented.” At that, activist and CodePink member Desiree Fairooz laughed, since Sessions is actually best known for being deemed too racist for a federal judgeship in the 1980s. As the Huffington Post reports, a rookie cop with no appreciation for irony arrested Fairooz, and prosecutors are charging the 61-year-old with attempting to “impede, disrupt, and disturb the orderly conduct” of the hearings.

Who is the prosecutors’ boss? Why, Jeff Sessions.

A lawyer representing Fairooz at trial noted that other spectators laughed during the Sessions hearings, including when he joked about disagreements with his wife. According to the prosecutor, it was “appropriate for the audience to laugh when Sessions made a joke about his marriage but not when Shelby claimed Sessions had a long record of ‘treating all Americans equally.’”

So let me see if I understand this – it’s legal to laugh at Jeff Sessions’s jokes, but illegal to laugh at a senator’s brazen lie about Sessions? What law is that exactly?

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