(Video) Sessions tells Durbin: Dem filibuster is harming national security

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9PpZ_IvMOc

WASHINGTON — Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) shot back at Dick Durbin (D-IL) Thursday for saying Republicans are threatening national security.

He’d “been trying to understand what is holding up funding for the Department of Homeland Security,” Durbin said earlier in the day.

“Have you ever heard of a filibuster?” Sessions asked Durbin during remarks on the Senate floor Thursday morning. “What about the filibuster you’re leading to block the bill that funds Homeland Security? I mean, how much more obvious can the answer be to what’s holding up funding for the Department of Homeland Security?… You and your team of filibusterers. That’s what it is. There is no doubt about that. We need to get this straight.”

The bill funding DHS has been held up in the Senate for weeks, where Senate Dems are filibustering even the possibility of a vote unless the GOP concedes to also fund Obama’s executive amnesty.

Sessions told Durbin that, despite the media and Democratic party’s best efforts to place blame on the shoulders of the GOP, “the whole world knows who is blocking the bill that funds Homeland Security.”

The illegal immigrants given amnesty by Obama’s executive actions could cost taxpayers upward of trillions of dollars, according to some estimates.

Several of Alabama’s Congressional delegates have spoken out on the need to pass DHS funding before the February 27th deadline, though they may disagree on how.

On Wednesday Congressman Mo Brooks (R-AL5) called on the Senate to “go nuclear” to pass the funding bill.

“The Senate leadership claims they lack the 60 votes to overcome a Democrat filibuster and pass the House’s Homeland Security funding bill,” Rep. Brooks said. “Yet a mere majority of the Republican Senate has the power overcome Democrat Senator obstructionism. Just as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Democrat Senate majority in 2013 used the ‘nuclear option’ to change Senate rules and cut off filibusters on presidential appointees, now-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Republican majority has the power to exercise the ‘nuclear option’ and eliminate filibusters for any bill that funds the federal government.”

Senator Sessions disagrees with the use of the “nuclear option,” saying it’s important to abide by long-held Senate rules.

“The only thing standing in the way of this bill is the Senate Democrats who will not allow the bill to go forward,” Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL4) said in a press conference Thursday.

Congress is expected to recess Friday for a week long Presidents Day break. When they return to Washington, they will only have a week before DHS’s current funding dries up, threatening a shutdown of the agency.