Now confirmed, Sessions faces a tough job at Justice — and Trump isn’t making it any easier

By Del Quentin Wilber

Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON, D.C. — After enduring an unusually bitter confirmation battle for a sitting U.S. senator, Jeff Sessions will barely have time to settle into his fifth-floor office at the Justice Department before he takes center stage in some of the nation’s most acute controversies.

The Senate voted 52-47 to confirm Sessions as attorney general Wednesday night after a prolonged fight. Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia was the lone Democrat to vote in favor of Sessions.

With too few votes to block the nomination, Senate Democrats slow-walked the confirmation, staging a dramatic overnight session Tuesday after Republicans silenced Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., preventing her from reading decades-old criticism of Sessions from Coretta Scott King, the widow of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

Even House Democrats, who have no vote on the confirmation, joined in protest Wednesday evening in the Senate chamber.

At Justice, Sessions will be responsible for leading the legal defense of President Donald Trump’s immigration restrictions, for halting and investigating terrorist attacks, and for probing hate crimes and abuses by local and state law enforcement.

He also is expected to play a key role in implementing Trump’s promised crackdown on illegal immigration by increasing deportations.

His boss isn’t making things easier. Last weekend, Trump denounced a federal judge in Seattle who had temporarily blocked Trump’s executive order suspending immigration and refugees from seven Muslim-majority countries.

A three-judge panel from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco heard arguments Tuesday on the government’s effort to lift the stay. The judges did not issue an immediate ruling, and Trump complained Wednesday that the legal process was taking too long.

“You could be a lawyer, or you don’t have to be a lawyer. If you were a good student in high school or a bad student in high school, you can understand this, and it’s really incredible to me that we have a court case that’s going on so long,” Trump told a police chiefs’ conference in Washington.

The legal battle over the travel ban is expected to wind up in the Supreme Court.

Sessions “is in a tight spot, that is for sure,” said John Hudak, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “He has a tough job for a whole panoply of reasons.”

Sessions was first elected to the Senate from Alabama in 1996 and served two decades on the Judiciary Committee, which reviews federal judges and conducts oversight of the Justice Department.

But in a partisan era, his confirmation hearings quickly broke along party lines. In the end, he did not receive a single vote from Democrats on the committee.

Supporters say Sessions is uniquely qualified to lead the Justice Department in such a turbulent time.

Pointing to his 12 years as U.S. attorney in Alabama, and two years as state attorney general, they said Sessions has the experience to prosecute criminals, make policy decisions and aggressively tackle illegal immigration.

They described him as personable and courteous, traits that led him to be generally well regarded in the Senate, and could help him win over career Justice Department lawyers.

“He is serious about both the law and the department, and with his background he is uniquely equipped to handle the job,” said Michael B. Mukasey, who served as attorney general under President George W. Bush and who testified in support of Sessions’ nomination. “I suspect the learning curve won’t be too steep for him.”

Democrats and civil rights groups worry that Sessions’ conservative record on civil rights, voting rights and environmental laws portends trouble.

They also are concerned that such an ardent Trump advocate — Sessions was one of Trump’s earliest and most enthusiastic campaign surrogates — will oversee the reported federal investigation into potential ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

U.S. intelligence agencies last month issued a report that concluded Russian intelligence agencies launched cyberattacks against Democratic Party officials and took other measures aimed at influencing American voters to support Trump.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and other Democrats have questioned whether Sessions can be trusted to enforce the law, especially if potential investigative targets are in the White House.

“It is very difficult to reconcile for me the independence and objectivity necessary for the position of attorney general with the partisanship this nominee has demonstrated,” Feinstein said to explain why she voted against Sessions’ nomination in the Judiciary Committee.

Sessions has said he won’t be afraid to tell Trump he was wrong or that a planned action is unconstitutional. An attorney general has “to be able to say no, both for the country, for the legal system and for the president, to avoid situations that are not acceptable. I understand that duty,” Sessions testified.

Legal experts and former Justice Department officials said Sessions would have a difficult task. Trump is used to getting his way. He also has expressed expansive views of presidential authority that worry even the most conservative legal scholars.

John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley who served in the Justice Department in the George W. Bush administration, said Sessions would have to combat those presidential impulses while retaining Trump’s trust — a task that Yoo likened to walking a tightrope.

“If you are too far from the president, you will get cut out of the decision-making process and you are not doing your job as attorney general,” said Yoo, who recently wrote in The New York Times that he had concerns about Trump’s use of presidential authority.

While in the Justice Department, Yoo was a vocal advocate for a muscular executive branch. He wrote the so-called torture memos that gave the Bush administration the legal authority to approve the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation” of suspected terrorists, including waterboarding.

“On the other hand,” Yoo added, “someone has to tell the president that what he is doing is illegal or unconstitutional, even when Trump’s instincts and his political advisors are pushing for it. Sessions is the only person in the administration now who can do that, tell the president no. We will have to see how that plays out.”