Yesterday, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Joey Kennedy took a whack at Senator Jeff Sessions for trying to stall immigration reform in their home state* newspaper, with a column entitled “Do Nothing? Now that’s something Sen. Jeff Sessions can do.”
As Kennedy writes:
I guess it makes sense that U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama would join a group of fellow Republicans known as the “do nothing” caucus. If Sessions knows how to do one thing really well, it’s to do nothing.
Two weeks ago, Sessions and a handful of other Senators wrote a letter to Chairman of the Judiciary Committee Pat Leahy (D-VT) asking for more time to discuss and consider immigration reform. Since Sessions is a strident opponent of reform, however, we can be pretty certain that the stall tactic is a front for trying to kill the bill entirely. As Kennedy’s column continues:
As if this issue hasn’t been discussed and debated and analyzed for decades…
If Sessions and his “do nothing” pals had an alternative proposal, that would be one thing. They don’t. They just want to jam up the process. They just want to do nothing.
America’s Voice calls Sessions “one of the leading (and loudest) voices against comprehensive immigration reform in the United States Senate.”
That can be expected, I supposed. He does, after all, come from the state that passed the cruelest immigration law in the nation — and is happy for it.
Sessions may be little more than a populist pandering for votes in his upcoming re-election campaign, but he also seems proud to be the “do nothing” champ in the U.S. Senate.
The world may be changing around Sessions, with the RNC encouraging immigration reform and the Associated Press deciding that it will no longer use the term “illegal immigrant.” But some things look like they’ll never change:
Still, as long as it works, Sessions will play the xenophobic crowd to the hilt. And as far as progress, do nothing.
Which just leaves the question: why would Marco Rubio take immigration advice from a guy like Jeff Sessions?
Read the full column from Kennedy here.
*That would be Alabama, the state that passed the worst-in-the-nation anti-immigrant law, HB 56–which has been mostly dismantled by the courts since 2011.
