Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions has come out against House Speaker Paul Ryan's omnibus spending package, accusing Ryan and the GOP establishment of betraying U.S. voters who backed Republicans in the 2014 midterms.
"Who do we represent?" Sessions asked Wednesday from the Senate floor as he scolded Republicans for supporting the measure. "There is a reason that GOP voters are in open rebellion. They have come to believe that their party's elites are not only uninterested in defending their interests but — as with this legislation, and fast-tracking the President's international trade pact — openly hostile to them. This legislation represents a further disenfranchisement of the American voter."
"The voters put Republicans in a majority in the 2014 midterm elections - a vote which constituted a clear decision to reject the abuse of our immigration system. That loyalty has been repaid with betrayal," he added in a statement released Wednesday afternoon, according to the National Review.
Early Wednesday morning, Ryan unveiled the bipartisan $1.1 trillion, 2,242-page spending bill, which is coupled with another package extending $680 billion in tax breaks for businesses and individuals. A vote could come as early as Friday morning, and President Barack Obama is expected to sign the measure once Congress passes it.
Sessions claims the spending bill would "fully-fund the President's refugee expansion; fully-fund sanctuary cities; fully-fund the resettlement of illegal aliens youth and their families crossing the border; lock-in tax credits for illegal aliens; and quadruple the highly controversial H-2B foreign worker visa being used to replace Americans as truck drivers, construction workers, theme park employees, and in blue collar jobs across the nation."
Despite broad support among Republicans for halting Obama's refugee resettlement proposal, Division H Title II would fund the refugee resettlement program and "allow for the admission of tens of thousands of refugees with access to federal benefits," many of who come from terrorist hotbeds like Syria and Afghanistan, according to Breitbart. The program is expected to cost $1.6 billion and bring 85,000 refugees to the U.S. in 2016.
The spending bill would fund multiple immigrant and visa programs that have been or could be exploited by Middle Eastern extremists, such as the F-1 student visa program and the K-1 fiancée visa program, which one of the San Bernardino shooters was admitted under.
Sessions and Senator Richard Shelby, R-Ala., warned in a joint statement: "The omnibus would put the U.S. on a path to approve admission for hundreds of thousands of migrants from a broad range of countries with jihadists movements over the next 12 months, on top of all the other autopilot annual immigration."
The omnibus would also fund Obama's 2012 executive amnesty action known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which has granted work permits and federal benefits to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who came to the country as minors.
Sanctuary cities — jurisdictions that protect illegal immigrants from deportation by refusing to cooperate with federal deportation requests — would be funded under Division B Title II of the omnibus, according to Breitbart.
Further, immigration attorney Ian Smith also claims the omnibus "would quadruple the number of H-2B visas for unskilled guest workers, for a total of more than 250,000." Those foreign workers would be allowed to enter the U.S. and work in many fields that don't require a college education, such as construction, hotel services, trucking, food processing and forestry.
The bill also lacks language to prevent illegal immigrants from receiving child tax credits. Sessions attempted to insert such language but his proposal was rejected.
"The Ryan-Pelosi package represents nothing short of a complete and total betrayal of the American people," wrote Breitbart. "Yet Ryan's omnibus serves a second and equally chilling purpose. By locking in the President's refugee, immigration, and spending priorities, Ryan's bill is designed to keep these fights out of Congress by getting them off the table for good. Delivering Obama these wins — and pushing these issues beyond the purview of Congress — will suppress public attention to the issues and, in so doing, will boost the candidacy of the Republican establishment's preferred presidential contenders, who favor President Obama's immigration agenda."
