Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee and a key immigration hawk, took to the Senate floor on Monday afternoon to attack the efforts by President Barack Obama to grant amnesty via executive order to millions of illegal aliens.
During his floor speech, Sessions endorsed a bill from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) that aims to curb the president’s executive amnesty efforts–and called on his colleagues to cosponsor it. Sessions said:
Senator Cruz has a bill that would stop this presidential overreach. Sessions said. It’s very simple. It lays out that we won’t spend money providing legal documents to people unlawfully in the country as defined by the law of America and as defined by the Congress of the United States. So, I will ask, will you cosponsor Senator Cruz’s bill and let’s defend our constituents, or will our congressional colleagues remain complicit in the nullification of our laws and basically the nullification of border enforcement?
Sessions’ fiery floor speech focused almost entirely on how Congress hasn’t done much–if anything–to fight back against President Obama’s executive overreaches when it comes to immigration law. He opened by citing the letter he hand-delivered to every member of Congress warning about Obama’s move to circumvent Congress and use executive power to grant amnesty to millions of America’s illegal aliens. Sessions also cited George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, a liberal Obama supporter, who warned that Congress letting Obama use executive power in the way he has is not good for the country.
Sessions asked his U.S. Senate colleagues:
Does anybody not respect this institution? Do we not respect the House of Representatives, the United States Senate? Have we gotten so partisan that we don’t care what the president does to diminish Congress? Don’t we have an institutional responsibility, a Constitutional responsibility to defend the legitimate powers of Congress? Sure, we can disagree sometimes, but this one is not a matter of disagreement, it seems to me. This is an overreach of dramatic proportions.
Sessions also noted in his speech that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) scored President Obama’s proposed $3.7 billion emergency funding plan via a supplemental appropriations bill and found that only $25 million of that request would actually be spent this year.
“This indicates clearly that the agencies are not in dire need of supplemental funding from this Congress, certainly not in the degree as asked for,” Sessions said. He continued:
Again, CBO’s analysis suggests that only $25 million of the $4.3 billion will be spent this year. What does that mean? It means we ought to slow down. We have no–there is no basis to demand a $4.3 billion increase in spending, emergency spending. Every dollar borrowed, because we’re already in debt; to spend $4 billion more is to borrow every penny of it. We should not do that until we find out more about what’s happening at our border.