Sadly, it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter how how many times he failed to tell the whole truth during his Senate confirmation hearing. It doesn’t matter how many times he spoke to the Russians. It doesn’t matter how unqualified he is to be the chief law enforcement officer of the United States.
Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III will never, under any circumstances, resign as Attorney General. Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) will join 350.org before that happens.
Sessions presumably laughed his wrinkled rear end off when Democrats declared that Sessions’s recusal from any potential investigation into Russia’s interference in last year’s election wasn’t enough and that he must step down as Attorney General; for all we know, such calls may have intensified his desire to stay on. For Sessions to resign would be tantamount to losing a war–and we need not explain why Sessions might not be interested in that sort of thing.
Why, exactly, would Sessions feel compelled to resign? Honor and integrity? Please. Preventing further damage to Donald Trump’s political standing? He may feel that Trump can provide enough distractions for an easily amused press corps (and electorate?) to allow the Russia ruckus to blow over.
Ol’ Beauregard has no regard for any of his critics, for traditional ethics, for basic decency. In his mind, what he did is no big deal, and all Trump has to do is yell “ISIS” and “illegal aliens” over and over until the public mind is focused elsewhere.
Just because erstwhile National Security Adviser Michael Flynn left the Trump Administration in the wake of a similar scandal doesn’t mean Sessions will do the same; Sessions is simply not going to walk away from a position that will allow him to punish his political and cultural enemies.
The angry Alabama native never got over the humiliation he rightfully endured when a Republican-controlled, though less wingnutty, Senate rejected his nomination to the US District Court 31 years ago. To resign would be to hand his political opponents another victory. There isn’t a chance in hell he will allow that to happen.
The vote to confirm Sessions last month became notable for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) silencing and savaging of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) after she read Coretta Scott King’s 1986 letter to the Senate urging the rejection of Sessions’s judicial nomination. McConnell’s scornful remarks about Warren–“She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted”–became fighting words for the anti-Trump resistance.
It is a dark irony that despite his risky business with the Russians and his deception of the Senate, Sessions will nevertheless persist with his agenda of rolling back voting rights and civil rights protections. Sessions wants to wipe out most of the 20th century and all of the 21st. This scandal is not going to get in his way.
If there are any doubts remaining in the progressive mind about just how fundamentally ruthless and ideologically barbaric members of the Trump Administration are, Sessions’s refusal to resign should set such doubts to rest. These are stone-cold diabolical people, every last damned one of them. Morals and ethics are punchlines to their jokes.
Trump and Sessions long ago declared unholy war on all things progressive, all things Democratic, all things rational and reasonable. There has indeed been a pivot in the Trump Administration. That pivot is the point where they became even worse.
