Protesters from a variety of grassroots progressive groups and larger liberal organizations were often the harshest voices in the room during Sessions’ hearings. They rose at seemingly regular intervals to rail against the Alabama senator, who was denied a federal judgeship in 1986 amid allegations he made racist comments to a colleague. More recently, Sessions has emerged as a vocal backer of voter ID laws.
Activist Kai Newkirk, who was arrested during a sit-in at Sessions’ office, told CNN Wednesday he was willing to be jailed because “Sessions’ history and present positions make it undeniably clear that he cannot be entrusted to uphold equal justice, civil rights, or the right to vote.”
Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee panel were mostly restrained in their questioning, with Minnesota’s Al Franken the rare Sessions colleague to confront him over his past record — deliberately overstated, Franken suggested — as a civil rights proponent.
With their party set to turn over the White House, and already nearly powerless in Congress, Democrats sitting on Capitol Hill could soon take a backseat to progressives and allied groups planning to stand up to Trump with mass protests and direct actions.
As their colleagues came under fire for offering what liberals saw as an overabundance of senatorial courtesy, Lewis, Booker and Congressional Black Caucus Chairman Rep. Cedric Richmond zeroed in on Sessions’ history with a sharper edge.
“Those who are committed to equal justice in our society wonder whether Sen. Sessions’ call for ‘law and order’ will mean today what it meant in Alabama when I was coming up back then,” Lewis said during his testimony. “The rule of law was used to violate the human and civil rights of the poor, the dispossessed, people of colour.”
Booker, meanwhile, sought to channel the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., when he said, “The arc of the moral universe does not just naturally curve toward justice, we must bend it.”
“America needs an attorney general who is resolute and determined to bend the arc,” Booker testified. “Sen. Sessions’ record does not speak to that desire, intention or will.”
Booker’s decision to so publicly oppose a Senate colleague — he is the first to do so in a confirmation hearing — shed light on the depth of the racial fault lines that figure to roil the new administration and its critics.
Difficult conversations are obviously not new in this country and they escalated during the course of the Obama administration, when Americans were focused at various times on Ferguson, Baltimore, Black Lives Matter and the very visceral fight over voting rights and the Confederate flag. Trump and his cabinet will bring a very different perspective than Obama and his. Partisan fights over race seem destined to escalate over the coming four years.
6. The lesson: The role of the FBI, in particular Director James Comey, in the 2016 campaign will remain a flashpoint in 2017
The moment: Democrats were alternately outraged and baffled when, in the course of a hearing with the Senate Intelligence Committee, Comey refused to comment on whether the bureau was investigating links between President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia.
The question came from Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat. He wanted to know whether the FBI had investigated potential contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The director, however, was not in a forthcoming mood and refused to comment.
Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, couldn’t help himself.
“You didn’t say one way or another whether even there was an investigation underway?” King asked again.
“Correct,” Comey said. “I don’t, especially in a public forum, we never confirm or deny a pending investigation.”
“The irony of your making that statement here, I cannot avoid,” King said, a clear reference to Comey’s looser lips during the campaign, when he jolted the contest with a very late public revelation that his agents would renew their review of emails potentially tied to Hillary Clinton’s private server.
Clinton was cleared, again, days later, but many Democrats believe the brouhaha cost her precious votes in a race that was ultimately decided by the narrowest of margins in a handful of states. Like Trump, their grudge is likely to endure.
7. The lesson: The leader of the Democratic Party is Barack Obama — and no one else comes close
The moment: In his farewell address from Chicago on Tuesday night, the outgoing president delivered a stark warning about the challenges facing American democracy while, both in the speech and recent remarks, offering a more coherent path forward than anyone else in his party.
Obama said goodbye in much the same way he entered national politics — with an appeal to a shared decency and common interests across the partisan divide. But a decade on from the beginning of his brief Senate stay, the twice-elected president addressed a country more openly at odds over race.
“After my election,” Obama told supporters in McCormick Place, “there was talk of a post-racial America. Such a vision, however well-intended, was never realistic. Race remains a potent and often divisive force in our society.”
Framing that divide as a “threat to our democracy,” Obama pleaded with Americans to emerge from their digital bubbles and more openly engage with political opposites.
“If you’re tired of arguing with strangers on the Internet,” he said to laughs, “try talking with one of them in real life.”
But his appeal to economic solidarity — which sounded a lot more like Bernie Sanders than his would-be successor Hillary Clinton — struck hardest.
“If every economic issue is framed as a struggle between a hardworking white middle class and an undeserving minority, then workers of all shades are going to be left fighting for scraps while the wealthy withdraw further into their private enclaves,” he said, while pointedly encouraging Democrats to engage “the middle-aged white guy.”
Whether that adds up to a winning strategy remains to be seen, but for a night at least, the departing Obama towered over the Democrats he leaves behind to take on Trump.