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Sessions, GOP Allies Ask For Hearings On Super-Secret Immigration Bill

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions and five other Republican senators are trying to stop the Senate’s Democratic leaders from rushing a huge business-backed amnesty and guest-worker bill through the Senate before it can be debated by the public.

On March 19, Sessions and the other senators sent a letter asking Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, to schedule hearings on the complex bill.

“We respectfully request that the public be given adequate time, consistent with past practice in handling complex comprehensive immigration legislation, to read and analyze the contents of the any such bill” before it is approved by the majority-Democratic panel, said the letter.

The letter was signed by six GOP committee members: Sessions, plus Sens. Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Mike Lee, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz. It was not signed by Sens. Lindsey Graham and Jeff Flake, two committee members who are helping to write the controversial measure.

So far, the draft bill is being kept hidden until the Spring recess ends in the first week of April. Major media outlets have given little coverage of the bill’s contents and likely impact on Americans.

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Sen. Sessions Presses USDA For More Info On Mexican Food Stamp Use, Participation Rates

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

After an effort to defund the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s food stamp outreach partnership with the Mexican government went down in committee Thursday, Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions continued to press the agency for more information about non-citizen participation in the food stamp program.

In a Friday letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack obtained by The Daily Caller, Sessions — who has been exchanging letters with Vilsack about USDA’s partnership with Mexico since last summer — requested additional information about the people the USDA has been enrolling in nutrition assistance programs and the agency’s program goals.

Last month, in a letter recently obtained by TheDC, Vilsack revealed that the share of overall Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamp, benefits going to legal non-citizens has accounted for between 3.5–4.0 percent of the total caseload since 2004.

The agriculture secretary further addressed the fact that those non-citizens who enroll in SNAP are not considered to be government-reliant under the current policies governing immigrant inadmissibility under the public charge statue. He additionally noted that the agency has provided guidance to this effect — pointing to a February 2010 letter from USDA Under Secretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services Kevin Concannon to all state commissioners.

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Sessions: Government Spends Trillions On Poverty Programs, But Poverty Continues To Grow

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions delivered the Weekly Republican Address Saturday, highlighting the fact that both poverty and spending on government assistance continues to grow in America.

“We spend a trillion dollars each year on federal poverty programs. That’s more than the budget for Social Security or Defense,” he said. “But poverty seems only to increase.”

Sessions, the ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee, highlighted the low-income troubles in the nation’s capitol, where 1 in 3 children in Washington D.C. live in poverty and 2 in 3 live in single parent homes. Just northward in Baltimore, Sessions added, 1 in 3 are living on food stamps and 1 in 3 children are living in poverty.

“Americans are committed to helping our sisters and brothers who are struggling, but we are seeing the damaging human consequences of our broken welfare state,” he said.

The Alabama senator slammed the Agriculture Department for its aggressive outreach efforts to enroll more people on food stamps, including strategies to overcome “mountain pride,” and the USDA’s contention that “each $5 in new [food stamp] benefits generates almost twice that amount in economic activity for the community.”

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Sessions: Jack Lew ‘Complicit’ In Violation Of Medicare Law

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Photo Credit: APThe office of Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), ranking member of the senate budget committee, sent out a statement claiming that Jack Lew, former White House Chief of Staff and current Treasury Secretary nominee, is “complicit in” violating the law that is “aimed at saving medicare.”

Alarmed by the unsustainable growth of Medicare’s unfunded obligations and the direct threat this posed to seniors, Congress in 2003 enacted a legal requirement that the President submit legislation if the Medicare Trustees issue a funding warning for the program as part of their annual report. This provision of federal law is commonly known as the Medicare Trigger, and it is intended to ensure that steps are taken to shore up the program’s finances before it is too late.

In 2008, then-President George W. Bush submitted Medicare legislation to Congress in response to such a warning being issued for the first time. Throughout the past four years of President Obama’s first term, no such legislation has been submitted, despite warnings from the Medicare Trustees every year.

Sessions’ office points out that the warnings were ignored “despite a clear and unambiguous legal obligation” to submit legislation in response. Jack Lew, as the head of the Office of Management and Budget in 2010 and 2011, was responsible for responding to the Medicare Trigger.

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Sessions: Large-Scale Amnesty Likely to Add Trillions to Debt

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Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions voiced concerns over the bipartisan proposal for immigration reform introduced on Monday by eight senators, saying the plan will substantially increase the already sky-high national debt and criticizing the federal government for inadequately enforcing existing immigration laws.

“No one should expect the members of the Senate are just going to rubber stamp what a group who met decided,” Sessions said on the Senate floor.

While immigration system needs to be reformed, Sessions said, the country has been through this dance before.

The Alabama senator recalled the failed promise of enforcement following immigration reform in 1986, as well as the aborted attempts at immigration reform in 2006 and 2007.

The latter efforts, Sessions said, didn’t succeed “because it did not do what they said it would do. It did not end the illegality. It did not set forth a proper principle of immigration for America, [and] it did not sufficiently alter the nature of our immigration system to advance the national interest of the United States.”

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Gov’t idiocy on steroids: Illegal aliens to reap up to $7 billion in tax credits

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Photo credit: Gage Skidmore

Illegal immigrants could receive more than $7 billion this year in federal tax credits, according to one estimate, thanks to a loophole in the law that allows people not authorized to work to reap the government payments with no questions asked.

Sen. Jeff Sessions’ office calculated that, based on recent trends, illegal immigrants could receive roughly $7.4 billion through a provision known as the Additional Child Tax Credit. That’s more than quadruple what the payout was four years ago, but the payments have been steadily increasing over the past decade.

Though illegal immigrants are prohibited from receiving similar tax credits, a quirk in the law allows them to qualify for the child tax credit. And it’s a “refundable” credit, meaning recipients can reap the money — with average checks totaling about $1,800 — even if they’ve paid no taxes.

An aide to Sessions, R-Ala., the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, said the issue is a “serious matter that deserves attention” and another sign of how “Washington is disconnected from reality.”

Illegal immigrants can qualify because even people not authorized to work in the U.S. are supposed to file returns with the IRS. If they don’t have a Social Security number, they are provided what’s known as an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number in order to file returns.

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Sen. Sessions: $25.4 trillion debt over next decade, proof Obama’s campaign is lying

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Photo credit: DonkeyHotey

The White House has delivered its 10-year budget forecast to Congress, and it predicts a trillion-dollar deficit for fiscal year 2012.

The project, titled the Mid-Session Review, projects $42.6 trillion in spending, and will balloon the federal government’s accumulated debt to $25.4 trillion by 2022, according to an analysis from the office of Sen. Jeff Sessions, the GOP’s budget chief in the Senate. The review was released Friday, reducing the chance it will get much coverage in the media.

Last year, the national debt grew to $14.8 trillion, an increase of $5 trillion from 2008.

The river of red ink shows that President Barack Obama’s campaign-trail ads are “dramatically false,” said a statement from Sessions.

Those new ads promise to pay down the accumulated deficits in a “balanced way.”

Read more from this story HERE.