Mr. Sessions also said he would recuse himself from any further investigation of Hillary Clinton over her private email server or the dealings of the Clinton Foundation while she led the State Department. His strong criticisms of the F.B.I.’s handling of those matters during the campaign, he admitted, could lead people to question his objectivity.

During the hearing, Republicans were ready with lavish praise and defenses of his character against charges of racism, while Democrats rarely offered more than tepid and predictable criticisms. Meanwhile, outraged protesters repeatedly interrupted the hearing with denunciations of Mr. Sessions and Mr. Trump before being dragged out by Capitol police officers.

A large dose of outrage is certainly called for, given the damage four years of a Sessions-led Justice Department would likely inflict on the hard-won yet fragile advances made for civil rights, racial and gender equality and humane justice. The prospect is particularly stark coming after President Obama’s Justice Department, which has aggressively defended and expanded civil rights for people and groups who were previously unprotected.

Mr. Sessions did nothing on Tuesday to dispel the understandable fears that he would stall if not reverse much of that progress. His defense against charges of racism that caused the Senate to reject him for a federal judgeship in 1986 was largely to say it hurt his feelings to be called racist, but his two decades in the Senate provide little hope that he has changed.

He focused largely on the law-and-order themes of the Trump campaign — emphasizing the need to combat a rising crime rate and show greater respect to police officers. He showed little interest in standing up for the rights of the most vulnerable Americans: say, poor and minority voters disenfranchised by strict and unnecessary voter-ID laws (he has been a strong proponent of those laws). He grudgingly acknowledged a woman’s constitutionally protected right to an abortion, but he stood by his belief that Roe v. Wade was “one of the worst, colossally erroneous Supreme Court decisions of all time.”