In the upper chamber, Jeff Sessions will play a key role in the battle against the president’s executive amnesty, as he did in the struggle to defeat the Gang of Eight bill last year and the immigration bill supported by President Bush in 2007. National Review has called him “amnesty’s worst enemy.”
In a conversation with National Review Online, the Alabama senator called the president’s actions “a grave threat to the constitutional order” and to the power of Congress to make laws. Now, he says, Congress has both “an institutional duty” and a “historic duty” to fight back.
“It is just unthinkable that this would be accepted, because who knows what another president may do, or this president in his next two years, if he succeeds in this power grab,” Sessions says.
The senator has proposed that the House respond by passing a funding bill that prohibits the use of federal funds for the issuance of work permits and everything else necessary to put an amnesty into effect. If that doesn’t pass the Senate, which remains under Democratic control until the Republican majority is sworn in in January, Sessions has urged the House to send a series of short-term, stopgap funding measures until the new majority arrives in Washington.
Thus far, he is not heartened by the response of GOP leaders, which has been one of vocally opposing the president’s action but refusing to propose a congressional response. “I’m uneasy about that,” Sessions says. In the Republican Senate conference, he says, he is seeing “good talk” and “strong comments” but no unified position about how to respond to the White House.
“The American people have demanded and pleaded for Congress to produce a lawful system of immigration and Congress has steadfastly refused,” he says. This amnesty opponent insists that now is the time for them to insist Congress begin to do something to enforce the laws, repair the system . . . and save the constitutional order.