Civil rights activists have made a probably doomed last-ditch effort to prevent the confirmation of Jeff Sessions as Donald Trump’s attorney general, as the Republican-controlled Senate prepared to approve his nomination on Wednesday.

A petition bearing the names of 1 million people asking lawmakers to reject Sessions, a rightwing senator for Alabama, was delivered to Washington by a coalition of activist groups that said his record made him “entirely unfit” to be the nation’s top law enforcement official.



“Senator Sessions has built his career on demonizing people of color, women, the LGBT community, people with disabilities, immigrants and refugees,” said Wayne Henderson, the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.



#LetLizSpeak: Senate's silencing of Warren prompts rallying of support Read more

Sessions is expected to be confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate in a vote later on Wednesday. The vote follows a heated hearing on Tuesday evening in which the Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts was silenced by the Republican leadership while trying to read sharply critical 1986 testimony about Sessions from Martin Luther King’s late widow, Coretta Scott King.



None of Sessions’s Republican colleagues have said publicly that they intend to vote against him and Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat from West Virginia, has said he plans to vote to confirm Sessions. The Republicans have 52 seats in the 100-member Senate; a simple majority is needed to confirm a cabinet nominee.



Trump’s nomination of the 70-year-old senator, who was blocked from a federal judgeship in 1986 following allegations of racism, has attracted extraordinary levels of opposition from members of Congress and campaign groups. As attorney general, Sessions would be responsible for the enforcement of federal civil rights laws intended to protect minorities.



A video advertisement released this week, which urged those watching to ask their representatives to vote no on Sessions, focused on his 1985 indictment of three African American activists on charges of voter fraud when he was the top federal prosecutor in Alabama’s southern district. The three were later acquitted by a jury.



Trump's cabinet Confirmed

James Mattis (Defense), John Kelly (Homeland Security), Rex Tillerson (State), Elaine Chao (Transportation), Nikki Haley (United Nations), Betsy DeVos (Education), Jeff Sessions (Attorney General), Tom Price (Health and Human Services), Steve Mnuchin (Treasury), David Shulkin (Veterans Affairs), Scott Pruitt (Environmental Protection Agency), Wilbur Ross (Commerce), Ryan Zinke (Interior), Rick Perry (Energy), Ben Carson (Housing and Urban Development), Sonny Perdue (Agriculture), Alexander Acosta (Labor) Awaiting Senate approval

Linda McMahon (Small Business Association), Mick Mulvaney (Office of Management and Budget director), Robert Lighthizer (US trade representative) Withdrawn

Andrew Puzder (Labor) Not yet announced

Council of Economic Advisers chair



“We were trying to register black people to vote,” Evelyn Turner, one of those indicted by Sessions, says in the clip. “And Jeff Sessions was trying to put us in jail.” Turner tells viewers that Sessions has not changed since he prosecuted her.



During Senate judiciary committee hearings on Sessions’ nomination last month, Cory Booker, a senator for New Jersey, became the first in the genteel chamber’s history to testify against the confirmation of a colleague. Fellow Democratic congressman John Lewis, a hero of the civil rights era, also testified passionately against the confirmation of Sessions.

In response, conservatives have rallied round Sessions. The 45 Committee campaign group, which is funded by prominent Republican donors Todd Ricketts and Sheldon Adelson, last month paid for national television advertisements that told people to urge their members congress to vote yes.



Sessions, a former state attorney general who has represented Alabama in Washington since 1997, was the first member of the Senate to support Trump’s wildcard presidential campaign and is credited with pushing the property tycoon toward a “law and order” agenda.



Allegations of bigotry, which he denies, have dogged Sessions’ career. After hearing accusations that he had made racist remarks, the Republican-controlled US Senate judiciary committee voted in June 1986 to reject his appointment by Ronald Reagan to a federal judgeship in southern Alabama. It was this judgeship that King was opposing in the letter that Warren read from on Tuesday.



A black prosecutor who worked for Sessions in his federal prosecutor’s office testified that Sessions had called him “boy” and told him to be careful what he said to white people. He was also said to have condemned the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as “un-American” and suggested that a white civil rights attorney might be a race traitor.



In his hearings last month, Sessions said: “This caricature of me in 1986 was not correct.”



More recently, Sessions has described Black Lives Matter as “really radical” and blamed the protest movement for a rise in violent crime in some US cities. He has consistently attacked US justice department investigations into troubling practices in local police departments, which the Obama administration opened in cities such as Ferguson, Missouri.



Last year, Sessions helped to block a bipartisan congressional criminal justice reform plan that would have reduced “mandatory minimum” prison sentences and made other changes to the federal prisons system.



This record has led civil rights campaigners to conclude that the grounds on which Sessions was rejected by the Senate in 1986 continue to exist today. Cornell Brooks, the current president of the NAACP, said his nomination was “deeply troubling”. Democratic congressman Luis Gutiérrez of Illinois said Sessions was the choice of people who had “nostalgia for the days when blacks kept quiet”.