Gee, that was easy.
The Senate confirmed Jeff Sessions to be President Trump’s attorney general on Wednesday night, over sustained but ultimately futile Democratic complaints that Sessions worked against minority interests when he was a U.S. attorney for Alabama, and that he’s too close to Trump to enforce the law independently from the White House.
Democrats changed the rules in 2013 so that only a simple majority is needed to approve a president’s Cabinet nominees. Under those rules, the Senate easily confirmed Sessions in a party-line vote, and was helped by Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who had said he would support Sessions’ nomination.
The vote is a vindication for Sessions that was decades in the making, as Democrats constantly sought to remind the public that Sessions was rejected for a federal judgeship in 1986 over charges that he worked to resist civil rights changes in his home state. Democrats made a point of noting that Sessions during his confirmation hearing said the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is “intrusive.”