Conservative Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions’ contemptuous description of powerful people who think they know better than the rest of us, but don’t.
“Masters of the Universe” usually refers to the media franchise featuring He-Man and Skeletor, which was made into a 1987 movie as well as a series of comic books and animated TV shows. It also was Tom Wolfe’s description of the moneyed Wall Street mavens in his novel Bonfire of the Vanities. And in the 1997 blockbuster Titanic, Kate Winslet’s character Rose indicates a group of cigar-waving big shots: “Now they will retreat into a cloud of smoke and congratulate each other on being masters of the universe.”
Sessions, who is one of Congress’ most ardent opponents of comprehensive immigration reform, uses the term in a similarly dismissive fashion. National Review, in a recent admiring profile of Sessions’ fight against border-related legislation, noted that he blasted corporate types supporting a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants as “masters of the universe in glass towers and suites.” Sessions, who is the Senate Budget Committee’s top Republican, lumps economists in that category, too. Meanwhile, his GOP colleagues John McCain and Lindsey Graham – who have joined Democrats in working on immigration – are “Washington masters of the universe.”
“I know who I work for, and that is the hard-working people of Alabama and the United States,” Sessions said in a January floor speech. “I don’t work for the masters of the universe.”
His fondness for the phrase has become so well known that when Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee complained about his inability to offer an amendment to a pending flood-insurance bill in March, he described the bill’s supporters this way: “These ‘masters of the universe,’ as my friend Senator Sessions has sometimes referred to them, are shutting the American people out of the process.”