US Senate votes to confirm Jeff Sessions as attorney general

The U.S. Senate voted Wednesday to confirm the nomination of Jeff Sessions as attorney general by a vote of 52 to 47.

The voting largely went along party lines, with the exception of Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia who backed Sessions.

The vote was the second close vote for a Trump cabinet nominee, after the historic 51-50 vote that sent Betsy DeVos to become the secretary of education Tuesday.

The heated debate over whether to confirm Sessions' nomination reached a climax Tuesday evening, when Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren was silenced by a vote after being accused of impugning Sessions' nomination by reading a letter written by Martin Luther King Jr.'s widow.

In the thirty-year-old letter, Coretta King accused Sessions, who was at the time U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, of using "the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as a federal judge."

The partisan tension added to Trump's frustration on delays to confirm his nominees. He tweeted Tuesday, "It is a disgrace that my full cabinet is still not in place, the longest such delay in the history of our country. Obstruction by Democrats!"

Trump nominated Sessions on Nov. 18. Sessions, 69, was a U.S. attorney in Alabama before entering the Senate in 1996. He is considered to be one of the country's most conservative senators.

source: Xinhua