Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) warned that trade deals are eating away our national sovereignty and threatening our security on Thursday’s edition of Breitbart News Daily.
Breitbart News executive chairman and host Stephen K. Bannon compared the issues at stake in Britain’s upcoming vote on exiting from the European Union with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and asked Sessions if the latter could be seen as “essentially an up-or-down vote on national sovereignty of the United States of America.”
Sessions said the issue of sovereignty was definitely at stake in these elections.
“If you don’t secure the border, as Trump said, you don’t have a nation. Your sovereignty is undermined,” he asserted, referring to comments from presidential candidate Donald Trump, whom Sessions has endorsed.
“Secondly, in trade, we need to have trade policies that protect the security and financial security of the United States – not create another international commission, like the beginning of the EU, which was a trade agreement where every nation gets one vote,” he continued. “Like the EU, where Vietnam and other countries get the same one vote as the United States. That is a huge sovereignty issue.”
“There just seems to be this view, particularly in much of our business community — they’ve already transitioned to a trans-national status,” he observed. “They just see the world differently. Borders are just impediments to them.”
“Well, people don’t die for the EU. The EU does not rally people. Nations, the traditional nation-state, is where people can function effectively. And in my opinion, we should just slow down on this,” Sessions advised. “Maybe a hundred years from now, something might change. But right now, I deeply believe it’s an intellectual, a philosophical failure to think we can transition to some sort of conglomeration of nations, and they’re going to be able to function as an entity when tough situations arise.”
He cited the inability of the European Union to deal with, or even rationally discuss, the migrant crisis and rise of Islamist terrorism on the Continent as an example. “They did nothing, and when the nation-states started standing up to try to take action themselves, they attacked the nation-states,” he said. “The EU became the impediment to a proper response to this migration into Europe. That’s the way I’m afraid it will too often be.”
Sessions warned that trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership would create similar “unions” which compromised the sovereignty of member nations, and hindered their ability to respond to a crisis… especially since TPP would be a “living agreement” that could be altered by other members in ways undesirable to the U.S., which would find its objections overruled.
“It strengthens itself, and the nation-state is therefore inevitably reduced,” he said of that “living agreement” process. “It is a danger, in my opinion. No doubt about it.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00AM to 9:00AM EST.
Listen to the full interview with Senator Jeff Sessions below:
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