The Democratic Effort to Keep Jeff Sessions in Office

In the long history of strange bedfellows in politics, there may be no more awkward alliance than the one that’s developed over the past year between congressional Democrats and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Senate Democrats were aghast when Donald Trump, then the president-elect, named one of his staunchest campaign supporters to lead the Justice Department a few weeks after his surprise election victory. They viewed Sessions as a virulently anti-immigrant legislator with a racist past, and as a Trump loyalist who would do the president’s bidding as attorney general while blocking criminal-justice reform and taking a buzz saw to civil and voting rights. All but one Democrat—Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia—voted against Sessions’s confirmation. And Senator Elizabeth