I confess to a weakness for the attorney general, Jeff Sessions. I say this despite the fact that I disagree with him on various issues—civil-asset forfeiture, for example, and the opioid crisis. But as is often the case in politics, certain whimsical reasons recommend him. To my mind, his very name—Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III—is exactly the sort of moniker a senator from Alabama ought to have. And once upon a time, he turned Groucho Marx’s famous aphorism—“I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member”—on its head.
Let me explain. When I briefly lived and worked in Alabama, a very long time ago, Sessions had a good reputation as a federal prosecutor in Mobile, later burnished by his tenure during the Reagan-Bush years as U.S. attorney for the southern district of Alabama. Yet for reasons having more to do with partisan politics than personal qualification, he ran into difficulties when Ronald Reagan nominated him in 1986 to the U.S. District Court.
It’s difficult to remember now, but in those days Congress was still largely the Democratic branch of government: Democrats had controlled both houses of Congress—almost continuously and with prohibitive majorities—from the early 1930s until the mid-1990s and relished limiting the powers and prerogatives of Republican presidents. Accordingly, as the South ceased to be solidly Democratic in the 1970s and ’80s, resentful Senate Democrats were especially hostile to presidential appointees who happened to be Southern Republicans. Sessions got caught in the crossfire.
After his District Court nomination failed in the Senate—an injustice followed, not long after, by the churlish rejection of Judge Robert Bork’s elevation to the Supreme Court—Sessions returned to his duties as U.S. attorney for the balance of the Reagan years and George H. W. Bush’s term as president. In 1994 he was elected attorney general of Alabama and then, two years later, joined the ranks of the very same World’s Greatest Deliberative Body that had disdained him a decade earlier.
There he remained until 13 months ago. Sessions was the first Republican senator to endorse Donald Trump in the primaries and as such was surely entitled to some reward when Trump beat Hillary Clinton. Yet I felt a certain pang on his behalf when, barely a week after the election, Sessions’s appointment as attorney general was announced. Not because of the near-constant uncertainty that must accompany any sinecure in the Trump administration—which, at the time, was not yet obvious—but because election victories sometimes cause lapses of judgment in the political class.
To be sure, it is possible, even likely, that on the eve of his 70th birthday Sessions sought to cap his career in public service with a senior cabinet post. But as Rex Tillerson is the most recent to discover, appointees in the executive branch serve at the pleasure of presidents, and as attorney general, Jeff Sessions not only sacrificed a safe Senate seat but positioned himself squarely (and uncomfortably) in the middle of the Washington food fight over Trump-Russian “collusion” in the 2016 election.
By recusing himself from any federal inquiry into the matter, the new attorney general did the only thing he could responsibly do under the circumstances. But I have to assume that the fact that Sessions’s Senate seat is now held—even temporarily—by a Democrat, coupled with his chief’s periodic public rebukes, must inspire the occasional second thought.
For the fact is that the office of attorney general is not only uncomfortable in the Trump administration but a decidedly mixed blessing under most circumstances. Cabinet secretaries are instructed, by the Constitution, to carry out the laws of the land; but while politics and statutes are more successfully mixed in other departments, the balance is especially awkward when the laws pertain to the Law.
There’s a reason why John F. Kennedy appointed his startlingly unqualified 35-year-old younger brother/campaign manager Robert to head the Justice Department, and Richard Nixon tapped his law partner/campaign manager John Mitchell for the same purpose. When conflicts arise, it’s useful for the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer to be your friend.
Sometimes, in history, the combination runs smoothly: Attorney General Francis Biddle opposed the internment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor but acceded to the judgment of the Roosevelt White House and the War Department. J. Howard McGrath was a loyal party man and convenient fixer—and was just as conveniently dropped when scandals imperiled President Truman. When President Eisenhower found himself in conflict with Joseph McCarthy, Attorney General Herbert Brownell revived the obsolete concept of executive privilege.
At other times, however, the alliance can be delicate. President Clinton was never especially comfortable with Janet Reno, the Miami prosecutor who rose from obscurity to become attorney general when Clinton’s first two choices for the post—Zoë Baird and Kimba Wood—fell by the wayside, and Reno evolved into a media heroine. By any measure, the president would have been entitled to end her tenure at the start of his second term; but by that time Clinton was so ensnarled in official inquiries and scandal—a veritable Arkansas Laocoön—that Reno was immovable.
Which leads to the present uneasy Trump-Sessions alliance. It is possible—indeed, probable—that the president, a novice in government if not politics, has failed to comprehend the extent to which Sessions has a constitutional duty to perform, regardless of the CEO in the White House. It is equally possible that the periodic Twitter grenades lobbed down Pennsylvania Avenue—“DISGRACEFUL!”—are a peculiarly Trumpian means of letting off steam, a necessity for any president.
Still, Jeff Sessions’s recent response bears repeating:
Nothing disgraceful about that.
