Republicans kept their Senate majority, and then Attorney General Jeff Sessions got the knife. The long-suffering attorney general offered his resignation barely half-a-day after the midterm elections.
Safely in power until at least 2020, Senate Republicans turned their back on their old Alabama colleague. His exit came just hours after a Trump press conference celebrating the GOP’s expanded majority in the upper chamber (which makes Sessions’ successor easier to confirm) — and less than two weeks after Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, deliberately said he was “nonchalant” about the fate of Sessions.
It is remarkable that Sessions survived for so long after recusing himself from the Russia investigation. He relied on Grassley for protection throughout his career.
As Fred Barnes reported for our sister publication, The Weekly Standard, it was the Iowa senator who blew up the Pruitt-for-Sessions scheme that the disgraced EPA secretary had been pushing behind the scenes. Grassley wanted to confirm judges. He did not want to sit through another round of confirmation hearings for a second attorney general.
But once his Senate bodyguard backed out, nothing was left to stop the long-expected axe from falling.
“The answer that I gave a year ago was directed directly at the president that I honestly didn’t have time to consider anything else. It was also somewhat of a defense of Sessions,” Grassley told the Washington Examiner earlier in October. “Now, I’m kind of nonchalant about defending Sessions. I like him very much personally, and I want him to be a good attorney general, but the president’s got a right to have somebody in there he wanted.”
Trump wants someone else, clearly. So, as Senate Republicans breathe a sigh of relief on Capitol Hill, Sessions breathes his last at the Department of Justice, abandoned by his bodyguard.
