Before he joined his GOP colleagues for their weekly conference lunch, Sen. Jeff Sessions took a chair outside of the upper chamber to preview President Obama’s Wednesday speech at George Washington University, which will likely touch on a variety of fiscal issues.

The syrup-voiced Alabaman, who serves as the ranking Republican on the budget committee, tells National Review Online that he has very low expectations.

Sessions predicts that the president will talk about general themes and avoid specifics. If that is the case, he hopes that pundits will look beyond the president’s words tomorrow and remember the White House’s actual budget, which he argues is the proposal that should be taken seriously, not some broad-brush address on a college campus.

“He can talk about the weather,” Sessions says, “It’s still just a speech. The American people are beyond speeches. We need to hear more than words; we need to hear numbers. He really should submit an entire new budget that sets forth his ideas, with the kind of specificity that Paul Ryan outlined in the House.”

The president’s budget, as is, “is the most irresponsible budget ever presented to the American people,” he adds, so only a fresh draft will suffice. “We are in a very serious debt situation and his budget did nothing to address that.”

Sessions urges the president to surprise him tomorrow by detailing solutions. “He has not once looked the American people in the eye and explained why we have to make changes,” he says. “The president is the one person who ought to do that, telling the people about the debt struggle that we are in and what it will take to get out of it.”

In coming months, Sessions sees the Ryan budget continuing to dominate the Beltway debate, unless the president grapples with the county’s growing deficit. “The debt has become a cloud over everything,” he says. “There is no other issue in Washington that is as serious. Ryan deserves great credit for creating the kind of environment that forced the president to talk about these issues. I know he would rather not talk about them at all.”