The Senate needs Jeff Sessions

At Breitbart, our friend Garrett Murch, a former member of Jeff Sessions’s Senate staff, argues that “America needs Jeff Sessions.” I agree.

The Senate, in particular, needs Sessions. Any conservative Republican from Alabama probably will vote the right way in the Senate most of the time. What makes Sessions stand out is his leadership in thwarting dubious legislation.

Garrett presents two examples: the comprehensive immigration reform bill of 2013 and the Trans-Pacific Partnership legislation of 2015.

I would add a third example, one with which I am very familiar: the lenient sentencing reform legislation of 2015. Like the two examples Garrett cites, this “jailbreak” legislation had loads of momentum behind it before Jeff Sessions intervened.

In the Fall of 2015, Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, had suddenly flipped and now backed leniency legislation. This meant it would sail through the Judiciary Committee, where Sessions’s fine staff had been all but frozen out of the process.

Republican Senators were falling into line, albeit without much enthusiasm in many cases. Senate Democrats, of course, were unanimous in their support of the leniency bill as the first step towards an even larger jailbreak.

Two Senators stood firm against the jailbreak. They were Tom Cotton and Jeff Sessions.

Thanks to their efforts, momentum for the leniency law stalled. Eventually, the legislation died on the vine.

More recently, while Sessions was Attorney General, a less egregious, but still highly dangerous, version of leniency legislation was enacted because President Trump, at the urging of his son-in-law, flipped on the issue. There was nothing Sessions, who was out of favor with the White House, could do to prevent this.

The key point, though, is that, if returned by Alabama to the Senate, Jeff Sessions will stand guard against the herd instinct that too often causes Republican Senators to join forces with left-liberal Democrats to push misguided legislation in the name of “compassion,” “globalism,” or Koch money.

Sessions has blocked such legislation before. He should be given the opportunity to do it again.

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