Donald Trump gets his first Senate endorsement - Senator Jeff Sessions

Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the main opposition immigration Senate approved today Donald Trump on stage during a demonstration in Alabama.

Sessions is the first senator to endorse Trump. Along with the backs of the governors. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Paul LePage of Maine, on Friday, and the former governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, on Saturday, which is another sign that many in the Republican Party are beginning to accept that Trump will likely be their candidate.

But the backup session Trump also makes a great deal of sense. Trump is, in many ways, based on intellectual framework Sessions.

Jeff Sessions is the ancestor of immigration posts Trump

Sessions has been perhaps the highest-profile figure in the Republican Party to request restrictions on legal immigration and unauthorized. He led the opposition to the "Gang of Eight" 2013 immigration reform in the Senate. (Ted Cruz has tried to align with sessions during the campaign by saying that "fought alongside Jeff Sessions" to defeat the Gang of Eight invoice., Actually, Sessions was certainly the sole leader)

As the chairman of the Subcommittee on Immigration in 2015, it has focused its efforts on attacking programs work visa to let legal immigrants to compete for jobs in the United States - a close cousin to the populist rhetoric of Trump itself on theme.

Sessions has really been a consultant on immigration Trump for most of his campaign. platform Trump immigration - which calls for deporting all unauthorized US, along with their children born in the United States immigrants, and took a hard line against future legal immigration as well - owes you a bit sessions.

At least, Sessions and his staff conferred with Trump in the days before the platform is released. And since Trump seemed to know what was on his own platform during a debate last fall, rumors have circulated that the staff actually Sessions wrote the thing.

Sessions, like Trump, has gotten into trouble for not denying the Ku Klux Klan

The chronological sequence Sessions support makes sense: Alabama is part of "primary SEC" Tuesday most southern states (as well as some Northeast and Midwest). Trump is far ahead in the polls in Alabama anyway, but an endorsement of one of the high-level political state can not hurt.

But time also presents an interesting juxtaposition - and perhaps a revealing. Because only a few hours before the sessions supported Trump, Trump flabbergasted ABC's Face the Nation host Jake Tapper for refusing to denounce the support of white supremacist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan. (Later on Sunday, Trump tweeted a superficial denial, annoying.)

Sessions and has its own problems with not having denounced the Klan. Arguably it took a federal judge.

In 1986, 39-year-old Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (then federal prosecutor) was nominated for a federal judge Ronald Reagan. As this 2002 New Republic article recounts in detail his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee were ... wrong.

First, a witness said Sessions had called the ACLU and the "anti-American" NAACP - and Sessions confirmed that actually could be seen that way in foreign policy. Then the witness said he had Sessions (in the words of the New Republic) "call to a white civil rights lawyer a" disgrace to the race "for litigating cases of voting rights." Then this happened:

A former black assistant federal prosecutor in Alabama called Figures Thomas said that during an investigation in 1981 of murder involving the Ku Klux Klan, Sessions was heard by several colleagues comment that "used to think that [the Klan] were OK" until he discovered some of them were "pot smokers." Sessions said the comment was clearly said in jest. The figures did not see it that way.

Sessions the judiciary was not confirmed. He (eventually) went to the Senate, and the Senate Judiciary Committee instead.

This does not mean that either Trump or Sessions actively supports the Klan. But both have followers who feel that whites are threatened in America, and they look favorably at a time when white America was big. That ideology sometimes involves a romantic idea of ​​the symbols of white supremacy (like the Klan or the Confederate flag) actually represented.

So on the eve of a primary through the heart of the Deep South, Trump simply doing what you have to do to keep your support - and have sessions on your side can only enhance its credibility.

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