By the final vote of 52 – 47, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions was confirmed Wednesday as the next U.S. Attorney General.  As expected, the vote was mostly split along party lines, coming in the wake of Senate Democrats speaking out in protest of the nomination, citing concerns over his civil rights record.

Sessions is a native of Mobile.  He graduated from the University of Alabama School of Law, and served in the U.S. Army Reserve from 1973 to 1986, attaining the rank of captain. 

Sessions was a practicing attorney in the town of Russellville before moving that practice to Mobile; he served as Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama from 1975 to 1977, prior to being nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, a position he held for 12 years. 

In 1986, Reagan nominated Sessions to be a judge for the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Alabama however the nomination failed after Senators said they were concerned over comments that were supposedly made by Sessions regarding civil liberties groups and desegregation.

Sessions was elected Alabama Attorney General in 1995, and the following year, he won the Republican Primary for the U.S. Senate in a race to replace retiring Democrat Howell Heflin; he then went on to defeat former State Senator Roger Bedford in the General Election, later earning a second term by defeating Democratic State Auditor Susan Parker in 2002. 

Other victories followed in 2008 and 2014.

Sessions was the first sitting Senator to endorse Trump – and later became one of President Trump’s first cabinet picks.

During the official swearing-in ceremony on Thursday, President Donald Trump gave this introduction to the new attorney general:

Here’s an excerpt from Sessions’ remarks following his swearing-in:

(al.com/www.al.com)