By Eliana Johnson
(this is part 1 of Johnson's piece; use link to read the rest): http://www.nationalreview.com/article/384665/amnestys-worst-enemy-eliana-johnson
A Masters of the Universe drawing hangs in a frame above the desk in the Capitol Hill office of Alabama senator Jeff Sessions. It stands out among dozens of pictures of his three children and seven grandchildren. The protagonist of the comic-book series, He-Man, is depicted mounted atop his heroic lion, Battle Cat. His muscles are bulging; his sword is thrust into the air. Battle Cat’s mouth is open, his fangs exposed. They are a formidable pair.
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. He has a gentle, almost grandfatherly quality, but he doesn’t shy away from combat. He derided the 2007 bill as “no illegal alien left behind”; in a single press conference, he blasted it as a “colossal error,” an “absolute scandal,” and a “fiscal disaster.” He declared: “Good fences make good neighbors.” All of this prompted the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank to call him the “Lou Dobbs of the Senate.”
By the time Sessions was done, on the eve of the Senate vote, calls from the bill’s opponents had shut down the Capitol switchboard. “People were sending bricks through the mail and saying, ‘Use this to build a wall,’ that sort of thing,” he says.
When he was elected to the Senate in 1996, Sessions had no special interest in immigration but, as a career prosecutor, he says the 2007 bill, which would have granted amnesty to the millions of illegal immigrants already in the United States, “just went against my understanding of what law in America was about.”
Sessions grew up in the rural town of Hybart, Ala., where his family ran a country store and, he has said, he learned “the value of hard work and being honest.” He was a Republican even when the South was strongly Democratic. At Huntingdon College in the late 1960s, he was involved with the GOP, and in his senior year he became chairman of the campus chapter of the Young Republicans.
Even before he came to Washington he had spent much of his career in public service, first as a U.S. attorney in Mobile and then as state attorney general. In 1986, when Sessions was 39, President Reagan nominated him to the federal district court in Alabama.
Sessions has always been willing to take on unpopular fights. As U.S. attorney, he prosecuted a group of African-American civil-rights activists for voter fraud, and his nomination prompted charges of racism from local and national officials. Colleagues at the Department of Justice accused him of racism, too, and the late Democratic senator Ted Kennedy warned that he would be a “throwback to a shameful era.” A black colleague and even a local black journalist testified on his behalf. Ultimately, his nomination was defeated. In an unusual turn of events, Senator Howell Heflin, a conservative Democrat who was expected to support his fellow Alabamian, bucked tradition and cast the deciding vote against him.
Sessions ran for the Senate in 1996 after serving two years as state attorney general and got some revenge: He won the seat held by the retiring Heflin. His victory was important for the GOP, too, as part of Alabama’s political realignment and that of the South more broadly. In 1994, Republicans had won the governorship and several other statewide offices. The 1996 elections tested the permanence of those victories, and Sessions’s triumph helped to consolidate the GOP’s gains.
Sessions says that proponents of comprehensive immigration reform, which would address many of the thorny immigration issues facing the country in a single bill rather than in smaller pieces, began redoubling their efforts on June 8, 2007, the day after a Bush-backed bill to bring it about was defeated. To the rest of us, it wasn’t until the day after Mitt Romney’s defeat in the 2012 presidential election that a new immigration bill began to look not just realistic but inevitable. Three days after the election, former George W. Bush aide Mark McKinnon opined, “The best thing about Republicans’ losing is that it will likely force them to cut an immigration deal.” An NBC News headline declared, “GOP resistance to immigration reform could be a casualty of 2012 election.” The Washington Post explained that “the GOP needs to do immigration reform — now.” The Republican National Committee, in its postmortem election report, came to the same conclusion.
A year and a half later, the landscape looks much different. House majority leader Eric Cantor is widely considered a casualty of the immigration issue. And, with Central American children flooding over the southern border, comprehensive immigration reform is, for the time being, all but dead.
More than any other national figure, Sessions is responsible for that turn of events. As the Senate debated the proposal of a group of eight senators — known as the “Gang of Eight” — for comprehensive reform last year, and then as the House toyed with passing it in various incarnations throughout the spring, Sessions’s office served as Ground Zero for the opposition. His staff circulated scholarly studies on Capitol Hill, sent dozens of policy memos to sway ambivalent lawmakers, and relentlessly hassled reporters about the perceived biases in their coverage.
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