Jeff Sessions Confirmed As Attorney General
After a highly contentious nomination process, Jeff Sessions was confirmed last night as the new Attorney General of the United States.
As expected, last night the U.S. Senate confirmed Senator Jeff Sessions as the next Attorney General:
WASHINGTON — Senator Jeff Sessions was confirmed on Wednesday as President Trump’s attorney general, capping a bitter and racially charged nomination battle that crested with the procedural silencing of a leading Democrat, Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Mr. Sessions, an Alabama Republican, survived a near-party-line vote, 52 to 47, in the latest sign of the extreme partisanship at play as Mr. Trump strains to install his cabinet. No Republicans broke ranks in their support of a colleague who will become the nation’s top law enforcement official after two decades in the Senate.
But the confirmation process — ferocious even by the standards of moldering decorum that have defined the body’s recent years — laid bare the Senate’s deep divisions at the outset of the Trump presidency. At the same time, the treatment of Ms. Warren, who was forced to stop speaking late Tuesday after criticizing Mr. Sessions from the Senate floor, rekindled the gender-infused politics that animated the presidential election and the women’s march protesting Mr. Trump the day after his inauguration last month.
Mr. Sessions cast his final vote as a senator to note that he was present for Wednesday’s tally. His confirmation was met by applause from his colleagues, including a few Democrats, on the Senate floor.
“I can’t express how appreciative I am for those of you who stood by me during this difficult time,” Mr. Sessions said shortly after the vote. “By your vote tonight, I have been given a real challenge. I’ll do my best to be worthy of it.”
Democrats spent the hours before the vote on Wednesday seething over the rebuke of Ms. Warren, of Massachusetts, who had been barred from speaking on the floor the previous night. Late Tuesday, Republicans voted to formally silence Ms. Warren after she read from a 1986 letter by Coretta Scott King that criticized Mr. Sessions for using “the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens” while serving as a United States attorney in Alabama.
(…)
As the 84th attorney general, Mr. Sessions brings a sharply conservative bent to the Justice Department and its 113,000 employees. A former prosecutor, he promises a focus aligned with Mr. Trump in pushing a “law and order” agenda that includes tougher enforcement of laws on immigration, drugs and gun trafficking.
Civil rights advocates worry, however, that he will reverse steps taken by the Obama administration in the last eight years to bring more accountability to police departments, state and local governments, and employers. Advocates point to his history of votes against various civil rights measures, as well as the accusations of racial insensitivity.
(…)
As the first senator to support Mr. Trump’s long-shot bid for president last year, Mr. Sessions became an influential campaign adviser. While he pledged repeatedly not to be “a mere rubber stamp” for the White House, Democrats asserted that he would not be willing to challenge legally questionable policies like the travel ban or the president’s threats to reinstitute the use of torture on terrorism suspects.
The arguments failed to sway any Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which voted, 11 to 9, along party lines last week to approve Mr. Sessions’s nomination.
That party division continued into last night’s vote on the Senate floor where every Democrat except one, Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia, voted against Sessions in what was apparently the closest vote to confirm an Attorney General in history. Of course, it was always likely that Sessions would prove to be a controversial nominee for any Cabinet position, especially Attorney General. As has been previously noted, he failed to win confirmation to be a U.S. District Court Judge thirty years ago due to the fact that Democrats objected to Sessions due to his record on civil rights issues as a United States Attorney and statements that he had reportedly made in the past about race relations and other issues. Ultimately, Sessions nomination to that seat was withdrawn despite the fact that the Senate was controlled by Republicans at the time that he was nominated. When he was named as Trump’s selection for Attorney General, it was guaranteed that these issues would come up again.
There are, of course, concerns about Sessions that go far beyond the civil rights issues that his nomination raises. In the past he has spoken negatively about important issues such as criminal justice reform, civil asset forfeiture, and a whole host of other issues. Additionally, it’s entirely unclear where he stands on the serious issues surrounding the issue of police abuse that came to the fore during the Obama Administration, especially in places such as Baltimore, Cleveland, Chicago, Ferguson Missouri, and Maricopa County Arizona. All of these places have been the subject of Department of Justices investigations over the past eight years, and each one of them resulted in the imposition of certain sanctions against the relevant law enforcement agencies. Will Sessions be as vigilant as previous Attorneys General on this issue? Also unknown is his position on how to handle the growing number of states that have legalized or decriminalized marijuana for both medical and recreational purposes. Under the Obama Administration, the Justice Department took the position that it would not enforce Federal law in those states except to the extent that activity crossed state lines. We don’t know how the Sessions Justice Department will act in this situation. Finally, of course, there are issues related to voting rights and civil rights that constitute much of the work that many Justice Department employees do. Democrats are concerned that Sessions won’t place the same emphasis on these issues that the Holder and Lynch Justice Departments did, and they’re probably right.
As with Betsy DeVos and other controversial Trump Cabinet appointments, Democrats can thank Harry Reid for the fact that Sessions is now the Attorney General of the United States. When Reid decided to push the button and use the partial ‘nuclear option’ to get rid of the 60 vote rule for Executive Branch appointments, Ambassadors, and Judicial nominations below the Supreme Court he was warned by Republicans and several Democrats that Democrats would come to regret going forward with that move when they were once again in the minority and there was a Republican in the White House. Now, here they are in exactly that situation and they are powerless to stop nominations that they obviously disagree with strongly. Indeed, if the 60 vote rule were still in place, it’s possible that Sessions would not have even been nominated. Of course, all of that is water under the bridge and we’re all left to deal with the consequences of Reid’s foolish short-sightedness.
This guy is a serious problem.
But all I’ve heard from the past two weeks is about how awful DeVos is.
People need to get their priorities straight.
@Jeremy: Education is near and dear to every parent, even setting ideology aside DeVos is clearly unqualified, and DeVos was always the most vulnerable nominee.
There was some shred of a chance of getting my GOP Senator, Rob Portman, to vote against DeVos, or find some excuse to not vote. There was no chance of swaying him on Sessions.
Very disappointed in Rand Paul. This was precisely the candidate he should have been voting against. Actually, the entire GOP should have voted against him if they really believe in that whole Constitution thing they’re always on about. Time for the states to gear up to protect what progress they’ve made in winding down the madness that is the War on Drugs.
@Jeremy: Right, there couldn’t possibly be TWO awful appointees in the same week. That would be too much to absor….
SQUIRREL!!!!
The fact that this ass-clown is the AG tells you how fwcked up the Trump administration is going to be. Already we are less free than we were before Trump was inaugurated.
I’m a white male who is financially comfortable, but I feel for the minorities in this country; women, people of color, LGBT’s.
The so-called president will take us back decades, and it will take decades to recover the gains in freedom we had made.
Anyone and everyone who voted for Trump is a fwcking idiot.
@Hal_10000:
I didn’t think I was capable of being further appalled by the depths of Trump’s ignorance, but he revealed the other day that he has no idea of what civil asset forfeiture is. He thinks it means confiscating drugs from drug dealers.
Democrats – hoisted by your own petard.
@CSK: The bottom line is that Trump will support any action the police take no matter what it is. But I do agree that he probably has no idea what civil asset forfeiture is. The ignorance of this buffoon is astounding. My guess is that when he spoke to the Australian PM they were on the phone for about three minutes when the PM realized that Trump is an idiot, and doesn’t have the knowledge base that a person would need to serve on a town council, much less be POTUS. I have no doubt that Trump couldn’t pass an eighth grade civics test.
@Jack:
Well, Sessions got a straight up-or-down vote, unlike Merrick Garland.
@SenyorDave:
Australian PM was passing Refugees that his county refuses to take in to the US.
But the narrative is that He is a moral authority on the treatment of Refugees.
@SenyorDave:
Trump is that person, who at a public meeting, steps up to the dais to speak during the public questions and comments period, and within 30 seconds you realize that he’s somewhat ‘off.’ You hope that no member of the Town Council will engage him in discussion. Just let him say his piece and return to his seat.
So of course 62.9 million Americans voted for that ‘off’ person.
We’re Number One.
@al-Alameda:
All of Obama’s political appointees got up or down votes as well.
@Paul L.: Australian PM was passing Refugees that his county refuses to take in to the US.
But the narrative is that He is a moral authority on the treatment of Refugees.
True on both points. But that isn’t the point. The point is that aside from his ridiculous temperament (no one can seriously defend his remarks about judges), his conflicts of interest and lying about them (he still hasn’t filed papers to transfer operations to his sons, and I’m guessing now that Chaffetz has supplicated himself to Trump it will never happen), Trump’s apparent ignorance on almost all issues is astounding.
@Jack:
But Merrick Garland got ‘the finger”
I understand.
@al-Alameda: Garland wasn’t a political appointee.
Please try to keep these things straight. We don’t have time to educate you.
@Jack:
Even Dunning and Kruger had no idea that it was possible to sink to your depths of stupid. There doesn’t seem to be a point that you can’t miss.
@Pch101: Blah, blah, blah….you need some new material.
@Jack:
So, you were unaware that Republicans refused to run Garland through the Committee hearings process, or on to the Senate for an up-or-down vote?
Well, there you go, you just learned something.
Payback will certainly be interesting.
@Hal_10000: Thanks for mentioning that. You’re right. Haven’t heard that much from Rand Paul recently.
Excellent video Jeff Sessions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCgD9OTqizA
@al-Alameda: Garner was not a political appointee, he was a Supreme Court nominee. And by “Biden’s Rule”, named after your dear Vice President Crazy Joe Biden, no Supreme Court Nominee will get a vote during an election year. Additionally, Sen Chuck-U Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in 2007 that President George W. Bush shouldn’t get to pick any more Supreme Court justices because Schumer was afraid the bench leaned too far Right. Finally, then-Senator Barack Obama said in 2006 that he supported the Democratic-led filibuster to stop Justice Samuel Alito from making it to the Supreme Court.
Just like now, with the 51 vote threshold to appoint nominees below supreme court, it seems you guys keep making the rules and then whine when they get applied to you.
DOUG: You appear to forget that had the Democrats done nothing, they still would not have been able to get what they wanted due to unprecedented Republican obstruction – Exhibit A – Garland! You are going off the very false premise that Republicans were willing to compromise. They were not! Harry Reid did not set that precedent – the Republicans did!
On a side note – as an African American, this feels a lot like one of those generational changing times where people of color were significantly set back and negatively defined by policies pushed by leaders that either don’t understand the black and Latino communities, don’t care, or actively trying to destroy them. And before anyone else realize the full consequence of the destruction left behind, it is entirely too late as it is embedded into society as “the norm”!
I strongly recommend everyone to view the Netflix documentary 13th. This document is about how the 13th Amendment has been used since the civil war as a loophole that effectively demonized people of color putting them at a disadvantage even today. It is a powerful lesson of how not knowing our history makes us doomed to repeat it.
@Hal_10000:
What, a so-called libertarian selling out his alleged convictions in order to hold onto his own job? Surprise, surprise.
@Jack:
Does not exist. Conservatives decided to name their “Rule” after Joe Biden – a very cute gesture, and one Republicans hope would give them cover for a political strategy, though disgraceful, worked for them. But I understand, Mitch got it done.
It is interesting to me that Republicans do not want to own their actions in this instance. No wait, I’m not surprised.
@al-Alameda: Just like now, with the 51 vote threshold to appoint nominees below supreme court, it seems you guys keep making the rules and then whine when they get applied to you.
As if McConnell wouldn’t have changed the rules now if Reid hadn’t then? Oh please, give me a break…what alternate reality do you live in…
All completely meaningless, as Democrats never followed through on any of these ideas, unlike the Republicans…
@LaMont:
Oops! That link was a total failure. Try this instead – 13th.
If it doesn’t work this time, just go to youtube.
@An Interested Party:
So, you admit the Democrats have no backbone.
@Jack:
Your problem is that you are so fixated on “red team” “blue team” nonsense that you have failed to realized that many here already agree with this! However, that’s not the issue. The issue IS the level to which Republicans are willing to race to the bottom to get what they want. They are constantly redefining the new levels to which the Dems have to grow or reinforce that backbone!
Actually it is Republicans who have no backbone, as they denied Garland a hearing and based that denial on bull$hit excuses implicating Democrats rather than owning their own completely unprecedented misdeed…
@Jack:
Actually I seem to hear more anger than whining. And the anger is not about the rules, it is about the genuinely awful candidates who have been nominated. The normal Republicans, like Kelly and Mattis, got through pretty easily. Sure there are policy disagreements but the president should get his nominees through unless they are ridiculous.
But Sessions? DeVos? Carson? They hearken back to the era of incompetence of Mike Brown, but with a level of malevolence that he could never have imagined.
I imagine that if Harry Reid feels any regrets about killing the filibuster, it is that he never pictured facing a group of cabinet nominations this bad.
@Pete S:
Guys like Jack feel threatened by anyone who is smarter than they are (read: virtually everyone), so they prefer incompetence.
@al-Alameda:
They never do…they are a bunch of pu$$ies with no principals beyond gaining and holding power.
8 months ago douches like Jack would have told you Putin was evil. Today Jack can tell you what Putin’s spunk tastes like.
Republicans talk about the Constitution…but they want to seize the assets of people who have not been convicted of anything.
They talk about freedom…yet we are less free now…just three weeks into this so-called presidency.
Obamacare is destroying the nation…but they have absolutely no fwcking idea how to fix it.
This cluster-fwck of an administration does not end well for the country….
Ha ha
http://www.floppingaces.net/2017/02/09/when-d-stands-for-dementia/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FloppingAces+%28Flopping+Aces%29
I imagine Sessions first action will be to perp-walk Kellyanne Conway for breaking Federal ethics rules.
Oh…I forgot…for Republicans ethics rules only apply when your name is Clinton.
Here is a good run-down of how stupid the so-called president is and, by extension, how fwcked the Republic is going to be with him in office…
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/02/trumps-exchange-on-asset-forfeiture-is-quite-discomfiting.html
@Pch101:
Says the guy who is indistinguishable from a liberal woman.
@Daryl’s other brother Darryl: Awww, you mad bro?
You poor liberal twat-waffle. You got your panties in a bunch and sand in your vagina.
Live with it…for at least the next 4 years.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA
DFTFT, FFS.
Here’s the sum-total of the so-called president expertise on nuclear arms:
We are so fwcked…
http://news.trust.org/item/20170209171124-868gh/
@Jack:
That might have been a decent comeback when you were 10.
Now that you’ve been socially promoted out of high school, it isn’t so impressive.
@Pch101: What is impressive is that you are in fact indistinguishable from a liberal woman.
@Jack:
Hey, Jack. I really hope you keep hanging around and keep proudly proclaiming your apologies for all things Trump and GOP.
Because the promises Trump and his Republican enablers have made are not going to be kept. And it’s not because Trump has shown himself so far to be grossly incompetent or because the Republicans are really good at spouting principles but piss poor at executing policy. No, the promises won’t be kept because they were completely detached from reality as they were being made and swallowed whole by the likes of you.
Numerous manufacturing jobs are not coming back to middle America. Brow-beating and protectionist tariffs won’t change the underlying economics of world markets and automation.
America will still become a white minority nation sooner rather than later. There will be no busloads of deportees and most Americans will remain generously welcoming to refugees, so the demographic trends are mostly set. Whatever boondoggle that ends up being called the Wall won’t prove any more effective than what’s in place today.
ISIS will still kill innocents while travel bans and torture only help recruitment of the radicals.
So stay loud and proud. Let your Trump freak flag fly, so you’re easy to find. Because, when reality sets in and it all goes south (as it most certainly will), Trump’s mobs will turn and we can only hope they go after all the apologists first. And I’m confident you’ll all throw Trump under the bus as you scramble away.
@Daryl’s other brother Darryl: You poor liberal twat-waffle. You got your panties in a bunch and sand in your vagina.
Live with it…for at least the next 4 years.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA
@Jack:
In all my years reading Internet comment threads, that just might be the weirdest insult I’ve ever heard anyone make.
@Kylopod: If you understood just how terrified people like Jack are by women, you wouldn’t be so mystified.
@Scott F.:
THE TRUMP EFFECT CAPTURED IN LAST 24 HOURS:
1) Lieawatha got sent to timeout.
2) DeVos became Education Secretary.
3) Arizona announces 7 billion dollar investment with minimum 10 thousand new jobs.
4) Melania Trump wins her libel suit against fake news.
5) Liberal biased ESPN reporting massive losses in revenue.
6) Iran removed their missiles from launching pads backing down to American threats.
7) Ted Cruz in his Bernie take down sent millions of snowflakes to bed in tears.
8) New poll shows majority and growing support for Trump’s refugee plans.
9) Botox Pelosi says she will not be able to work with Bush.
10) Maxine WAAAWAAA is crying for an emergency meeting of UN to stop Putin’s invasion of Korea.
11) Jeff Sessons was confirmed as AG
12) And a Democrat Senator (kevin DeLeon) from California admitted (under oath via testimony) half his family and nearly all illegal aliens have fake ID’s, Social Security Cards and fake driver’s licenses.
@wr:
It’s not terror, it’s just lib women and men all look alike to me.
AL law says that in case of a vacancy the Gov is to call a special election. The Gov has announced – naw, he’ll just appoint someone. The seat isn’t even cold yet, and he’s appointed one Luther Strange to replace Sessions. Strange is the Atty Gen’l, and perhaps not coincidentally, heavily involved in an effort to impeach the Gov. And in case of a vacancy for AG? The Gov gets to appoint a replacement. I think it goes without saying that all the above are GOPs.
I should remind everyone that Jack is the same commenter who interpreted a Carlin monologue as straight commentary and confused a parody site with real news. Now he’s presenting himself as some kind of insult comic, doing his version of “Your mama’s so fat” jokes minus the tiniest hint of wit or imagination. The lack of self-awareness is astounding even to my cynical mind.
Somebody has had way too much sugar today, haven’t they, Jackie?
Or was it meth?
@Jack:
Damn PCH…work it…
http://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20160507/23c5289b7ac0d43f5d76463efddf3a62.jpg
Can a person be any more of a dim-wit than Jack???
@Jack: +^1000
Especially went the OTB comment circle jerk all put on their pussyhats together
Very telling, the misogynistic insults…
@Jack:
Thank you for making my point. Twelve items on your list and not a one is within a million miles of delivering a result that’s been promised.
If you (and apparently bandit) think that most people who voted for Make American Great Again will measure success by the number of liberals who are pissed off, you’ve got a BIG surprise coming. If these people don’t have the nice factory jobs, cheaper/better healthcare, destroyed ISIS and white supremacy Trump has promised them in the next couple of years, they’re not going to give a damn that someone/somewhere “put Elizabeth Warren in her place.” They’re going to be mad as hell that they were sold a bill of goods.
When the pitchforks come out, all sane people will know the blame lies with the party that controls all branches of the government and the orange clown who leads them.
@Jack: So is this your form of coming out of the closet?
or are you just that immature that you think calling someone a woman is some kind of amazing insult and never bothered to think it through?
@Scott F.: You guys have a$$holes like Jack all wrong. He doesn’t give a fwck whether Trump is successful at all. He sole purpose here is to agitate and get a rise out of the lib-ruls. He’ll always find a way to turn it into a way to insult lib-rul “sacred cows”, etc.
If you check his Trump effect list–it wasn’t really about $hit but some headlines that might make the lib-ruls mad.
He aint $hit so don’t pay him any mind.
I was just wondering. How many Trump cabinet nominations have been defeated. I’m thinking an integer between -1 and 1. Pretty soon we can ask the same question about Supreme Court justices………..and the answer will be the same.
@Guarneri: Your point? Are you just trying to rub it in their faces that Republicans have gerrymandered their districts so well they have only a couple truly contestable districts? If they couldn’t get all the nominations through with their numbers in the house and senate then that would be remarkable.
@Jim Brown 32:
That describes a hefty chunk of so-called Trump supporters.
@Scott F.:
Honestly, that’s why a lot of them voted that way. Because THAT’LL SHOW THEM DUMB LIBTARDS!!! MAKE THEM SNOWFLAKES MAD!
It has never occurred to them that we don’t get mad because we are such sensitive souls and a twit called us a name, we get mad because the policies they are advocating are destructive, cruel, and pointless and are an obvious scam. The damage their temper tantrum has caused will take a generation to fix.
@Guarneri:
You actually think that Democrats thought the votes would go differently?
Well, you can stop wondering. Even zerohedge readers would probably guess, given ironclad Republican control of Congress, that none of Trump’s nominees would be derailed.
Betsy DeVos paid good money – about $200 million in contributions to Republican efforts – for her Cabinet position, so I hope she can find a good Number-2 lead pencil on her first day at the desk.
@Kylopod and @Facebones:
No doubt there’s a faction of right-wing nutjobs whose raison d’etre is sticking it to libruls. They’ll never be reasoned with; they’ll never be empirical; they’ll never reflectively admit error. And of course, they’ve jumped on the Trump Train as the perfect vehicle for their obsessive dickishness.
But, that faction, plus the more pernicious and even fringier alt-right, have always been there and they are best ignored (or taunted as is sometimes good sport here at OTB).
What makes now different is that the nutjobs and the alt-right have jointly managed a winning coalition by glomming onto a broader group of the disillusioned who were susceptible to the fantastic promises of a snake oil salesman. And just as happened with Trump University, Trump Steaks, Trump Airlines, Trump Vodka, etc., eventually these people are going to come to realize that they got sold a steaming pile of bullsh!t.
The great progressive mission of the coming 4 years is to ensure that when the realization that it’s all been a con job finally hits this group and they are rightfully pissed off, that they turn their wrath on the GOP, Trump and the deplorables of the Right base. We can’t allow them to deflect blame to the Left or the disenfranchised Others progressives strive to support as they’ve done so successfully in the past. This mission should actually benefit in that the Right controls all of government and that Trump has given up on the dog-whistling in favor of a more in your face bigotry.
So let Jack be a smug as he wants to be today. It will make the comeuppance all the more fun to watch.
@Scott F.: The type you claim should be ignored has just been elected President of the United States.
What a joke