Jeff Sessions: Defund Obama's Exec Amnesty in Next Funding Bill

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) called on Congress to strip funding from President Barack Obama’s forthcoming executive amnesty in its next funding bill. 

In a Thursday appearance on Fox News’s The Kelly File, Sessions said that in Congress’s next funding bill, lawmakers should prevent the White House from spending any federal funds to enact an executive amnesty. Sessions, who is set to be Budget Chairman, said Congress routinely bars the executive branch from spending money to execute policies that Congress does not want to fund. 

“We do that all the time,” he told host Megyn Kelly. 

He noted that Congress, for instance, barred the president from spending any money to close Guantanamo. Similarly, Sessions said that since Obama’s executive amnesty would be “a very expensive scheme,” Congress must “bar the expenditure of any money to carry out such a scheme.” 

Since Obama intends to issue ID cards and work authorization permits to millions of illegal immigrants to give them to power to take jobs, which Sessions said was “improper and contrary to the laws of the United States,” Sessions said Congress can use its power of the purse to prevent federal dollars from being spent on those programs. 

Sessions said Obama’s executive amnesty would violate “the constitutional structure and law, and it needs to be stopped,” and he urged current Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to, as an “institutional person,” be against it in order to “defend the integrity of Congress,” which has “the sole duty to pass immigration laws.” 

Sessions mentioned that Republicans like Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Marco Rubio (R-FL), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) – who in the “Gang of Eight” wrote the Senate’s amnesty bill – “have condemned roundly” Obama’s executive amnesty proposal. 

Sessions said Americans have been asking Congress for “a lawful system of immigration that serves the national interest” for 30 years. Instead, Sessions said, Obama is destroying the morale of the country’s immigration officers, noting that the morale of immigration agents is the “lowest of any agency in the government.” He said it was an “unbelievable circumstance” that immigration officials actually sued the Department of Homeland Security to allow them to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.

Sessions said Obama is “arrogantly refusing to follow the will of the American people” and is not fulfilling his “duty to faithfully see that the laws of the United States are executed.” 

Sessions called for “a principled immigration system that serves the interest of the American people and does not pull down wages, does not deny Americans jobs that they would otherwise be able to take.” Working Americans, Sessions said, would be “overwhelmingly in favor of that.”

Unfortunately, Sessions reminded viewers that the Senate’s amnesty bill only doubled the number of workers coming into the country to take jobs and would enable up to thirty million people to get legal status over the next ten years. In addition, Sessions said the Senate’s comprehensive bill “would not be an effective enforcement tool,” and “that’s why the House said it was dead on arrival.” He said the Gang of Eight’s “talking points sounded wonderful,” but once one actually read the bill, it became apparent that “it did not do what it promised.” 

“We got to write a bill that works,” Sessions said, noting that there are so many “laws that are simply not being enforced and encouraging more and more people to come unlawfully,” which put “extreme pressure “on working Americans whose wages are down and whose employment prospects are down.”

Sessions also had a message for Senate Democrats who may be in favor of massive amnesty legislation. 

“Look to what happened to some of your colleagues in this past election,” he said of the recent midterm elections in which voters thumped Democrats, in part because they disapproved of Obama on illegal immigration, which was Obama’s worst issue heading into the midterms.