Jeff Sessions: Harry Reid's No-Amendments Strategy Kept Problems in Budget

Senate Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-NV) refusal to allow any amendments to the budget deal that just passed the Senate has allowed problems in the legislation to make it into law, according to Senate Budget Committee ranking member Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL).

The deal was cut between House Budget Committee chairman Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Senate Budget Committee chairwoman Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), and it passed the House last week.

“I appreciate the earnest work that went into crafting this proposal and the sincere policy disagreements on both sides,” Sessions said in a statement following the vote, in which the budget passed the Senate 64-36. “Had amendments been allowed in the Senate, we could have fixed the problematic features of this proposal, some of which have only recently been uncovered.”

Sessions said the United States Senate is “supposed to function as a deliberative body where bills are carefully considered, amended, and debated”–but in this case, he said, it did not operate that way.

“Instead, Majority Leader Reid rushed through this closed-door deal without a single amendment,” Sessions said. “His conference blocked my amendment, for instance, to replace pension cuts for wounded warriors with the closure of a tax welfare loophole. At present we are left with a tax-and-spend plan that also removes a procedural tool to prevent Democrats from exceeding spending limits and raising taxes again in the future.”