Senator Tries to Run Out the Clock on Immigration. WASHINGTON — Senator Jeff Sessions, an elfin Alabamian with a mischievous smile and a relentless approach to legislative battle, has a theory about the sweeping immigration bill pending in the Senate: It’s as good as dead. Immigration Divide: Top Democrats in Senate Urge Faster Action (June 18, 2013) Immigration Divide: Director of Enforcement Agency Resigns to Work for Bank (June 18, 2013) “The longer it lays in the sun, the more it smells, as they say about the mackerel,” said Mr. Sessions, the Republican enthusiastically leading the opposition to a bill others on his side of the aisle see as vital to the very future of the Republican Party. If that sounds familiar to the immigration rights advocates who have been pressing an overhaul since 2006, it should. “As sunlight falls on the mackerel, it begins to smell more and more,” Mr. Sessions said in 2007 as he successfully waged war on a previous immigration bill, championed by President George W. Bush and pushed forward by his party’s most senior leaders. In 2006, the dead-mackerel theory played out for the first time as Mr. Sessions helped churn an immigration bill written by the Capitol Hill titans Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and John McCain of Arizona into Senate chum. Advocates of the legislation — Republicans and Democrats — insist this time will be different. The Republican drubbing in November among Latino voters, the shifting demographics of the American electorate, and the rise of telegenic champions of the immigration changes like Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, both Republicans, have changed the stakes as well as the political equation. But in Mr. Sessions, they face an opponent with experience, one who reminds his staff every day that passage of immigration legislation was supposed to be inevitable in 2006 as well, and even more so in 2007. His tactics are the same as they were back then: organize the opposition, break down the bill section by section, raise questions over every aspect of it, slow progress on the floor to a crawl through procedural objections and a flurry of amendments, and hope that in the light of day a conservative backlash will crush final passage. During the first official week of debate on the Senate floor last week, Senate leaders were able to hold all of one amendment vote — in large measure because of Mr. Sessions’s delaying tactics. “Sessions is taking a full-spectrum view of this bill, and his opposition is not just one section: it’s from Page 1 to Page 1,041,” said Tripp Baird, director of Senate relations at Heritage Action, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s political arm and a vociferous opponent of the immigration bill. Mr. Sessions does not necessarily hold the same sway in the Senate as the lawmakers he is challenging. The leading champions of the immigration bill include the Senate’s No. 2 and No. 3 Democrats, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Charles E. Schumer of New York, along with a former Republican presidential nominee in Mr. McCain and one of the party’s brightest stars in Mr. Rubio. Mr. Sessions, the son of a country-store owner from rural Alabama, is neither party leader nor telegenic star. He was elected to the Senate in 1996, a decade after that same body blocked his nomination by President Ronald Reagan to a Federal District Court judgeship amid accusations of racial insensitivity. His main job at the moment, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, has little to do with the task at hand. What he has is a visceral distaste for a measure that would grant 11 million illegal immigrants a path to United States citizenship, increase the number of legal immigrants allowed in, and reinvigorate guest worker programs across the country. His motivation, he said, is simple: Other Republicans are too scared to take the lead, fearing they will be labeled anti-immigrant, intolerant or worse. It has fallen to him again. “People want to vote for something. I mean that makes you feel good. You want to fix the problem,” Mr. Sessions said, “but we’ve been hijacked by legislation that won’t work.” New York Times - 06/18/2013. efsadvocacia.br
Posted on: Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:05:34 +0000
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