May 25, 2013
WASHINGTON—U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) responded tonight to the President’s State of the Union Address:
“Once again President Obama failed to look the American people in the eye and tell them the truth about our perilous financial condition or the egregious waste of taxpayer dollars that occurs every day. Excessive debt is pulling down growth, destroying jobs and incomes, and threatening every American worker. The President’s policies are creating dependency and poverty. No longer can we measure compassion by how much we spend on poverty but how many people we help to lift out of poverty. Our shared focus must be to help more Americans find good paying jobs and the ability to support themselves and their families.
Additionally, President Obama’s remarks on immigration are deeply troubling. The biggest obstacle we face to reform is this nation’s failure to establish lawfulness in the system. The President’s immigration plan meets the desire of businesses for low-wage foreign workers while doing nothing to protect struggling American workers. President Obama’s plan also ignores the dire warnings of federal law enforcement officers. Just today, the president of the ICE agents’ union wrote the White House and expressed his concern that ICE officers have been kept out of White House immigration meetings, detailing their many concerns over the evisceration of federal immigration law. In that letter, he explained: ‘Until these concerns are resolved, I fear that any enforcement mechanisms in a future immigration bill will, like the laws already on the books, not be enforced.’”
