Quote: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.”