Jeff Sessions is your new attorney general. After a marathon session of testimony about the long-serving Alabama lawmaker’s record on voting rights, race, and criminal justice, Sessions has been confirmed, as expected, by his colleagues in the U.S. Senate, by a margin of 52 to 47. (West Virginia’s Joe Manchin was the only Democratic senator to vote for Sessions’ confirmation. Sessions himself abstained.)
What this means is that one of Donald Trump’s most loyal advisers is now the country’s most powerful law enforcement official. As the head of the Department of Justice, he will enjoy access to Trump’s ear while bearing the burden of his whims. In the process he will transform a federal agency that has, for the past eight years, been used as a tool for advancing civil rights, extending mercy to drug offenders and intervening on broken police departments plagued by systemic racism and cruelty.
Under Sessions—a man whom Steve Bannon recently called, in the Washington Post, “the fiercest, most dedicated, and most loyal promoter” of Trump’s agenda in Congress—the Justice Department promises to become a very different agency. Instead of an instrument of progress, it stands to morph into something more like a weapon that has fallen into the wrong hands—one that will likely be used to flatter and undergird Trump’s severe worldview on “law and order” and perhaps even carry out his personal vendettas.
In Sessions, Trump has found a lieutenant who will likely use the force of the law to protect the White House from outside opposition while maintaining the veneer of proud independence. From now until this all somehow ends, the Department of Justice will be a machine for making Trump more powerful. It will be up to the people who work inside of it, the lawyers and civil servants who have decided to stay in their jobs in spite of everything, to jam up the barrel of the gun.
