Amnesty’s Worst Enemy | National Review Online
AUGUST 6, 2014 By Eliana Johnson
How Senator Jeff Sessions helped stop comprehensive immigration reform
… A small gold plaque sits below the drawing in the same frame. Etched on it are a portion of the remarks Sessions delivered on the Senate floor in June 2007, two days before the comprehensive immigration-reform bill championed by President George W. Bush and several prominent Republicans was defeated in the Senate. Sessions led the opposition to that bill, and his efforts were among the reasons for its unexpected collapse. “No one small group of people have a right to meet in secret with special-interest groups and write an immigration bill and ram it down the throat of this Senate,” he told his colleagues. “I oppose it. It is not right.”
The artwork was a gift from Cindy Hayden, Sessions’s former chief counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee, after the 2007 bill was defeated. Sessions called the “small group” that had hashed out the legislation — the politicians, political strategists, and special-interest groups — the “masters of the universe.”
It’s one of his favorite political put-downs. He refers to the CEOs and corporate interests that support amnesty for illegal immigrants as the “masters of the universe in glass towers and suites.” Politicians like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who have repeatedly tried to push a path to citizenship through Congress, are the “Washington masters of the universe.” Economists, too, are masters of the universe, and former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke was the “master master.”
Sessions, 67, is a low-profile guy. Though he is not well known nationally, he has for years now been the instrumental force in quashing repeated attempts to pass comprehensive immigration reform. …
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