Sessions
Outlines Majority Leader Reid’s Abuse of Power, Calls For Restoration Of
Senate’s Historic Role
WASHINGTON—U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions
(R-AL), Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee, delivered the following prepared
remarks Wednesday, September 17, on Majority Leader Reid’s tactics to control the Senate, limit
open debate, and erode individual Senator’s rights in representing their
constituents:
“It brings me no pleasure to make the
remarks I am compelled to make today.
The Senate, the legislative body
heralded by the late Robert Byrd as the second great Senate in history—the
first being the Roman Senate—is being eroded beyond recognition by Majority
Leader Reid and those who support him in that process.
Once again here we are, at the 11th
hour, being asked to vote for a spending bill that no member has had the
opportunity to meaningfully analyze, scrutinize, or investigate. Once again, we
are being asked to fund the entire government in one catch-all bill with no
opportunity for a single amendment, improvement, or meaningful consideration.
No opportunity for the American people to know what’s being passed and to hold
their elected representatives accountable for their actions. Once again, this
huge bill is being rushed through under threat of government shutdown, so our
Leader can send his members home to campaign. That’s the purpose really, to
vote once, go home, and campaign. Sad to say, it’s politics first.
We have not voted on a single
appropriations bill in the Senate this year. Not one of the 12 appropriations
bills required to fund the government has come before the Senate. Committees
are bypassed, secret deals rule the day, and millions of Americans are robbed
of their ability to participate in the legislative process.
It’s been so long since we’ve followed
the regular order, it is necessary to provide a basic civic review.
Each year, Congress is supposed to pass
adopt a budget resolution, which outlines the spending goals for the upcoming
year. Then, based on spending levels contained in the budget resolution,
individual committees are to report out authorization bills based on the
expertise and experience of the members serving on those committees, shaping
where the spending is supposed to go, laying out priorities and objectives for
our Federal government to serve its citizens.
Then, the Appropriations Committee is
tasked to produce appropriations bill for each area of the budget, which are to
be individually considered, debated, and amended on the Senator floor.
Each year, the Senate is supposed to
consider individually the 12 appropriations bills. This gives each member, and
their constituents, a chance to review and analyze each part of the budget and
offer suggestions for saving money, improving efficiency, and better serving
taxpayers, which we are failing to do. We don’t have a dime to waste.
But under the tenure of Majority Leader
Reid, the budgeting process has been dismantled. We’ve only passed one budget
in the last 5 years. Our committees stand by idle, and the floor is run not for
the purpose of legislative debate but as an extension of the Democrat campaign
committee.
The Senate has ceased consideration of
appropriations bills altogether, relying more and more on autopilot resolutions
and catch-all continuing resolutions and ominous omnibus spending packages.
When I first came to the Senate, almost every single spending bill was debated,
amended, and passed in the Senate. Now we regularly go year to year without
debating a single stand-alone spending bill on the Senate floor.
One of the worst tactics by which
Majority Leader Reid has suppressed Senators’ rights and blocked open debate
has been a technique called “filling the tree.” Under this tactic, he uses his
majority rights to keep Senators from offering amendments, as representatives
of their states and the American people. Blocking amendments prevents the body
from working its will, prohibits legislation from being improved, and protects
Senators from being held accountable by voters on the great issues of the day.
It keeps the Senate from being the critical sounding board for the issues of
the day.
Our Majority Leader has used this
tactic—filling the tree—90 times during his tenure. To put this in perspective,
the six previous Majority Leaders filled the tree only 49 times—combined.
Senator Reid has filled the tree almost 40 more occasions than all of the six
previous Majority Leaders did cumulatively over their tenures. This stops
amendments from being voted on.
He has shut down one of the most important
functions that Senators exercise to defend and advance the interests of their
constituents.
But it doesn’t stop there.
The Senate is supposed to be
Washington’s cooling saucer. That is why, on many important and controversial
matters, 60 votes are required to adopt a measure or to confirm a nominee.
And, importantly, to change the rules requires a 2/3 vote.
This 2/3 vote threshold is critical,
because it ensures that the rules actually have meaning—that they apply when
either party is in power and cannot be changed on a whim. To change Senate
rules requires a broad consensus across the entire body. This protects the
rights of individual senators to be heard on the issues of the day. It is the
key component of the Senate’s heritage of discussion and debate.
Yet, Leader Reid, in an exercise of
brute political force, changed the Senate rules by a simple majority vote. He
ignored the counsel of the Senate Parliamentarian—the preeminent protector of
the Senate’s practices and procedures—and in one stroke changed the nature of
this august body, perhaps forever.
Today, under Harry Reid, and the
Democratic senators who empower him, Senators cannot even consider important
legislation; they cannot offer amendments; and they cannot even fully debate
issues of the day.
Huge bills are rushed through in the
waning hours of a session.
Systematically, the rights of Senators
to provide equal representation to each state is being dismantled.
But it gets worse yet still.
As we all know, President Obama has promised
that after the midterms he would issue an executive amnesty to 5–6 million
immigrants who are unlawfully here. This executive-ordered amnesty would
include work permits for millions of illegal workers, along with photo ID’s and
Social Security numbers, and it would include more guest workers for large
corporations.
The President and the immigration
lobbyists meeting secretly in the White House are trying to implement through
executive action the same disastrous policies that were rejected by Congress
through the House of Representatives. Once the public learned what was in the
Senate amnesty and guest worker bill, they declared: no, no, no. So the
President is conspiring to go around Congress, and what does Mr. Reid say—what
does the Leader of our Senate say? He tells the President to “Go Real Big” and
to bypass Congress with the biggest amnesty you can do.
Majority Leader Reid has blocked this
Senate from considering the House plan—legislation passed by the House and
sitting at the desk—to stop the President from executing this unlawful act. He
is determined, completely, to ensure this executive amnesty happens and to do
whatever he can to do see that it does. The principles that govern our
political system, separation of powers and public debate, are of no importance.
But, colleagues, as we know, Reid only
operates with the support of his Conference. We saw this vividly when I made a
motion that would allow us to take action to stop the executive amnesty and every
Senate Democrat except the junior Senator from West Virginia voted with the
Majority Leader to enable the President to go forward with his unlawful amnesty
decree. It’s unbelievable.
And to this day, not one Senate Democrat
has spoken up to support the House plan to stop the executive amnesty or
demanded that Mr. Reid bring it up for a vote. Every member that supports
Senator Reid is as much a supporter of President Obama’s unlawful amnesty as
they would be if they were sitting in a room helping him sign the order. This
is the time. It’s either stop it now, or it may be too late to stop him. And we
need to vote on it, and people need to be held accountable. Every American
needs to know where their Senator stands on the President’s unlawful assumption
of power to violate plain law of the United States to carry out a political
agenda he has that the American people reject. It’s just that simple. It’s
about power and it’s about politics—it’s not about what’s best for America.
All of us owe our constituents a full,
open, deliberative process where the great issues of the day are debated with
their scrutiny and we receive their input, with our rights respected, our
responsibilities honored, and our Senate strengthened in the process.
The democratic process is messy,
sometimes contentious, and often difficult. But it is precisely this
legislative tug of war, this back and forth, which forges national consensus.
And people have to stick their necks out and say what they believe on important
issues facing America. It is the process our founders utilized to discover the
truth. While secret deals may appear to keep the trains running on time, they
also keep them running, too often, in the wrong direction. Only through a
renewed open legislative process, carried out in the full light of day, can we
clean up this government, forge real national consensus, achieve accountability
in Washington, and allow our Senators and Congressman to be there on the front
lines to sink or swim on how they perform. We are not guaranteed political
office; the American people don’t work for us. We work from them. And it
returns power, thereby, to the everyday citizen. It is time for us to restore
once again the great Senate of the United States.
I thank the chair, and yield the floor.”
No comments:
Post a Comment