The Trump administration intervened twice this week with Chuck Grassley’s efforts to pass legislation, on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program for undocumented immigrants and on criminal justice reform.
On Wednesday, President Trump urged senators to support Grassley’s DACA immigration bill and its “four pillars” of creating a “lasting solution” for young undocumented immigrants who entered the US as children, building Trump’s promised border wall, ending the immigration diversity visa lottery, and making changes to family immigration policies. “I am asking all senators, in both parties, to support the Grassley bill and to oppose any legislation that fails to fulfill these four pillars — that includes opposing any short-term ‘Band-Aid’ approach,” Trump said in a statement.
Some may not like it but REALITY is that Grassley/Cornyn is only DACA fix that can pass Senate+House+Trump. DREAMERS can help by telling Dems to get on board, stop wasting time & ACTUALLY SUPPORT A BILL THAT CAN BE SIGNED INTO LAW. Let’s deliver certainty that DACA kids deserve
— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) February 14, 2018
Despite the president’s support — or likely in part because of it — Grassley’s bill was one of four immigration bills that failed to pass Thursday. Grassley proposed giving a path to citizenship for nearly 2 million undocumented immigrants who arrived in the US as children, but also allocating $25 billion for a Mexican border wall, scaling back family immigration opportunities, and ending the diversity visa lottery. With strong Democratic opposition, the bill failed by a 39-60 vote.
Although Trump had Grassley’s back this week, his attorney general, Grassley’s former Senate colleague Jeff Sessions, did not, making Grassley “incensed.” In a Valentine’s Day letter, Sessions wrote the Iowa senator and Judiciary Committee chairman, “strongly” urging him to rethink a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill he’d been working on for over two years, which was co-sponsored by Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin.
“In recent years, convicted drug traffickers and other violent criminals have received significant sentencing breaks from the federal courts and the United States Sentencing Commission,” Sessions wrote about the bill, which proposed sentencing reform for nonviolent drug offenders and tougher penalties for violent offenders. “Passing this legislation to further reduce sentences for drug traffickers in the midst of the worst drug crisis in our nation’s history would make it more difficult to achieve our goals and have potentially dire consequences.” (Both Grassley and Sessions are longtime drug warriors; Grassley once likened pot smoking to genocide, rape, and child abuse.)
Incensed by Sessions letter An attempt to undermine Grassley/Durbin/Lee BIPARTISAN criminal justice reforms This bill deserves thoughtful consideration b4 my cmte. AGs execute laws CONGRESS WRITES THEM!
— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) February 14, 2018
“It’s Senator Sessions talking, not a person whose job it is to execute law, and quite frankly I’m very incensed,” Grassley told Politico Wednesday. He suggested the Sessions had stabbed him in the back after Grassley “went to [Sessions’] defense” when Trump considered firing the attorney general last year, and after Grassley helped get controversial Trump Justice Department nominees approved.
Grassley also blamed Sessions for the Republican Party’s lost Senate seat in Alabama, which Sessions abandoned to take over as AG. “If he wanted to do this, he should have done what people suggested to him before: Resign from attorney general and run for the Senate in Alabama again,” Grassley griped to Politico about Sessions’ interference with his bill. “We’d have a Republican senator.”
Despite Sessions’ opposition to the criminal justice reform bill, it was approved Thursday by the Judiciary Committee with a bipartisan 16-5 vote.
