Jeff Sessions has earned a reputation as a tough interrogator. The Alabama senator led the spirited opposition to Supreme Court nominees Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan when he was ranking member of the Judiciary Committee. Before entering Congress, he was a prosecutor, a U.S. attorney, and a state attorney general.
And in his latest role as the top Republican on the Budget Committee, Sessions has been pressing the congressional GOP’s public relations battle on spending, the deficit, and the national debt more aggressively—and more visibly—than just about anyone.
“I feel like the loyal opposition, Republicans with integrity, need to endeavor every day to tell the truth about our financial circumstances,” Sessions told me in his Washington office. “That’s what I see my job as right now.”
At first glance, Sessions seems an unlikely candidate to lead the charge. He’s short and unassuming, speaking slowly and deliberately, with a nasal Alabama twang. There’s nothing imposing or foreboding about his person. And he probably isn’t the first senator that comes to mind at the words “YouTube sensation.”
But on Capitol Hill, that’s exactly what Sessions has become. His “BudgetGOP” YouTube account is updated several times a week with videos of floor speeches, media appearances, and congressional hearings that focus on the same message: The debt is unsustainable, and the president needs to lead.
The news media are starting to take notice. In one hearing on the Obama budget request, Jack Lew, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, focused on the administration’s dubious claim that the president’s proposal would stop adding to the debt. By the end of Sessions’s cross-examination, Lew was pleading vaguely about “respecting” each other’s positions.
“I can’t respect a position that suggests this budget reduces the debt,” Sessions shot back. “If you take that position, we’re talking beyond each other.” The C-SPAN cameras were rolling, and that video has logged over 32,000 views on YouTube. Undoubtedly more have seen the exchange since ABC News clipped the video for a story, which prompted the left-leaning Politifact to call the administration’s claim that its budget would reduce the debt “false.”
“We don’t have the votes in the Senate to do the things I think ought to be necessary,” Sessions says. “But at the same time, we have the ability to influence the national debate.”
Sessions is sounding the same alarm about unsustainability as his House counterpart, budget committee chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, but the two have different styles. Ryan is the wonk with the facts, figures, and actuarial tables in his mental filing cabinet. Sessions is the Southern lawyer with a talent for attention-getting theater.
“I’m excited that he’s in this role,” says Ryan. “He is bringing a prosecutorial zeal to the budget.”
Other cabinet officials have received the same treatment as Lew, including Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner, from whom Sessions got an admission that the debt was “unsustainable” under the budget proposal, and Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, who, when asked how the president planned on funding his transportation budget request, meekly suggested the administration and Congress “sit down together and figure this out.”
“Well, ‘sitting’ and ‘figuring out’ is a little late when you’ve got a budget that assumes it’s going to be done when it’s not going to be done,” Sessions responded.
Of all the federal government’s fiscal problems, it’s the national debt—the money the federal government has borrowed to finance ever-increasing discretionary spending and exploding entitlement programs—that most concerns Sessions. In floor speeches and TV appearances, he often notes the sharp increase in government borrowing as spending has skyrocketed under Obama, a figure that would continue its steep rise under the president’s proposed 2012 budget.
“We’re not doomed to economic slowdown,” Sessions says, “but there is no doubt, from the best experts we’ve heard from, that we could have another debt crisis rather soon if we don’t change what we’re doing.”
The most shocking number Sessions presents is the interest on the debt. He is constantly pointing out that under the president’s budget plan, ten years from now the interest on the debt will be $844 billion, nearly double the combined spending of 15 federal agencies that year.
Sessions isn’t optimistic that President Obama wants to do anything about controlling the debt. “I believe he is like a child with his hand in the cookie jar,” Sessions says. “He is not serious about constraining spending.”
Despite his background in law and justice, Sessions may be even more attuned to budgetary problems. He was elected Alabama attorney general in 1994, riding a wave of discontent over reckless spending in the state government.
“The incumbent I beat [Democrat Jimmy Evans] had mismanaged the office terribly,” Sessions says. “It helped me win because he was behind on his electric bill. He couldn’t pay his electric bill!”
Faced with a $5 million shortfall on a $15 million budget, Sessions cut a third of the attorney general’s staff and consolidated offices outside of Montgomery. The gap was nearly closed within three months. Sessions says they did the job of the attorney general better and more efficiently than his predecessor. And personnel, he says, still isn’t back up to the level it was when he came into office 15 years ago.
Sessions says the experience taught him “that the protestations you hear from the federal bureaucracy, that reductions are going to result in the government sinking into the ocean, [are] often exaggerated.”
Even in the face of such institutional obstacles, Sessions is confident he’ll win the present PR fight. He believes the American people have already started paying attention to the problem of our debt and Washington’s unwillingness to address it by decreasing spending.
“I think we can win because the truth wins if you sustain the advocacy,” Sessions says. “Their position is not tenable under the facts. We want a budget that’s based on facts.”
Michael Warren, a Collegiate Network fellow, is an editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard.
