[Infowarrior] - Senate confirms Sessions as attorney general

[Richard Forno]

Senate confirms Sessions as attorney general

By Blake Hounshell and Nahal Toosi

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/senate-confirms-sessions-as-attorney-general-234823

The Senate on Wednesday voted to install Sen. Jeff Sessions as the nation’s next attorney general, ending a confirmation battle that plunged the chamber into bitter acrimony and shattered all notions of senatorial courtesy.

The narrow confirmation of the Alabama Republican as head of the Justice Department, finalized with a 52-47 vote Wednesday evening, was never in doubt as Republicans stuck together to elevate their colleague to President Donald Trump’s Cabinet.

But the final hours of the confirmation fight over Sessions and his fitness to serve as attorney general came to a head over the extremely rare and dramatic rebuke of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), whom Republican senators deemed had violated Senate rules forbidding one member from impugning another.

“Frankly, Jeff Sessions is a very fine person, and they all admit that,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who has been incensed for weeks over how Democrats have fought the nomination, said Wednesday. “I guess because he’s from Alabama, they think every white male is a racist, or at least might be. So that’s wrong. I just think that’s wrong, it’s obnoxious and it’s something that we ought all decry.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) took it one step further during an interview on Fox News, calling Warren’s criticisms against Sessions “demonstrably false” and accusing Democrats of being the “party of the Ku Klux Klan.”

The nomination of Sessions – one of the Senate’s most affable characters – has been fraught with controversy since the beginning. The veteran Alabama senator had been rejected for a federal judgeship more than three decades ago over accusations of racism as a prosecutor, which was an immediate focus in his latest confirmation fight. Democrats also charged that Sessions’ deeply conservative stances on issues like immigration, civil rights, abortion and criminal justice reform was out of line for what was expected of the nation’s chief law enforcement official.

His surrogates attempted to fight off the racism charges early on, lining up scores of African-American surrogates who testified on Sessions’ behalf, both through the media and in his confirmation hearing in January. During his own testimony, Sessions directly rejected the racism allegations, calling them “damnably false charges.”

“The caricature of me in 1986 was not correct,” Sessions testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, on which he served for years. “I do not harbor the kind of animosity and race-based discrimination ideas that I was accused of. I did not.”

But many civil-rights groups and influential black lawmakers quickly mobilized against him. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) took the remarkable step of testifying against another senator in line for a Cabinet position – an act that had never been done before in the history of the chamber.

For weeks, Senate Republicans have defended one of their own. Traditionally, senators have shown a deference to a colleagues who are promoted to the Cabinet – but for Sessions, that wasn’t the case.

“We all know our colleague from Alabama. He’s honest. He’s fair. He’s been a friend of many of us on both sides of the aisle,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Wednesday. “It’s been tough to watch all this good man has been put through in recent weeks. This is a well-qualified colleague with a deep reverence for the law.”

One conservative group, the Judicial Crisis Network, launched ads in an attempt to pressure red-state Democrats up for reelection next year to support Sessions. But ultimately, all Democrats save one – Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia – opposed the Alabama senator.

“As attorney general, Sen. Sessions will serve as the people’s lawyer, not the president’s lawyer,” Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) said. “I’m worried he will not be an independent voice from the president as the job requires, and will instead defend all pieces of the president’s agenda without question – whether constitutional or not.” Sessions was a close Trump ally during the presidential campaign and was his first endorser from the Senate.

And then there was the Warren episode.

On Tuesday, the Massachusetts senator had been reading a letter from Coretta Scott King, the widow of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., that she sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1986. One of King’s criticisms that Warren repeated on the floor – that Sessions would “chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens” – was deemed a violation of Senate rules silenced, and Warren was forced to be silent for the rest of the debate.

The chaos that ensued only served to elevate Warren’s initial cause: Shine a light on Sessions’ record and try to defeat him at all costs.

“I just wanted to read the letter, and I want everybody to read the letter,” Warren said in an interview with POLITICO on Wednesday. “That’s how I see it.

Burgess Everett contributed to this report.