The Week

• Say what you will about Twitter, it’s an improvement over Josh Earnest.

• President-elect Donald Trump has appointed Alabama senator Jeff Sessions to be the next attorney general. Sessions is best known for his hawkish immigration stance, but that is only one aspect of a long career dedicated to law and order. Before being elected to the Senate, Sessions served as Alabama’s attorney general and as U.S. attorney for Alabama’s southern district, during which time he helped to desegregate Alabama schools and oversaw the prosecution of Henry Francis Hays, the head of the state’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan, for the murder of a black teenager, Michael Donald. Hays was ultimately executed, and a $7 million civil judgment against the Klan helped crush the group in Alabama. Those tidbits are worth keeping in mind as Democrats rush to declare Sessions “racist,” relying on specious accusations from three decades ago, when Ronald Reagan unsuccessfully nominated him for a federal judgeship. Former Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter, who crossed party lines to help sink Sessions’s nomination, confessed in 2009: “My vote against candidate Sessions for the federal court was a mistake.” After eight years of Eric Holder—the only attorney general in American history to be held in contempt by the House of Representatives—and Loretta Lynch, Sessions has an opportunity to restore the integrity of a department that has deservedly fallen into disrepute.