Lefties didn’t mind when Obama ‘reprogrammed’ billions in taxpayer funds for illegal alien welfare

When anti-federalists were scared that the proposed Constitution would grant the president king-like powers, Alexander Hamilton penned an essay in Federalist 69 to allay their fears. Among the paradigm differences distinguishing the power of a president from that of a king, Hamilton wrote, whereas “the one [a president] can confer no privileges whatever, the other [a king] can make denizens of aliens.”

In 2012, President Obama, after declaring, “I am president; I am not king. I can’t do these things just by myself,” proceeded to not only grant illegal aliens amnesty but to confer on them positive privileges of denizens, namely work permits and Social Security cards. Because of those cards issued to over 770,000 aliens, billions of dollars in refundable tax credits, aka welfare, were handed out to them in violation of immigration law and the welfare reform bill of 1996. Not a single Democrat protested. To be fair, not too many Republicans did either.

Now, evidently, Democrats believe it is OK for a president to unilaterally make residents of aliens and divert taxpayer funding for their welfare, but a president can’t use defense funds for our own border against the cartels who are bringing in the very aliens incentivized to come as a result of Obama’s executive action.

Obama handed out resident status to roughly 770,000 illegal aliens, of which about 683,000 are still active. Providing this primarily low-income group of individuals with Social Security cards made them all eligible to collect the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which is essentially a wealth transfer program through the tax code. While there is no definitive data on how much we spent on refundable credits for this particular amnesty, a 2015 estimate from the Joint Committee on Taxation predicted that Obama’s second executive amnesty – DAPA – would cost $2 billion in earned income tax credits (EITC) over five years just for the retroactive portion of back taxes they were eligible for until the program was halted by the courts. The CBO gave a similar estimate for a parallel amnesty proposal in 2017, concluding that the cost of the EITC accessed by this population would be $5.5 billion over 10 years. Either way, the point is that to this very day, these illegal aliens unlawfully granted Social Security cards are drawing funds from the Treasury pursuant to an illegal executive order.

And $5.5 billion is roughly the same amount Trump would transfer from other defense accounts to the border wall under the Emergencies Act, except he would be doing so pursuant to statute and in defense of our sovereignty. Obama did this in violation of statute and in violation of the sacred trust of the American people by handing out welfare to invaders. Even if one is uncomfortable with Trump’s particular decision, there is simply no comparison to Obama’s DACA amnesty. For Democrats to support DACA to this day is scandalous hypocrisy.

Read the rest from Daniel Horowitz HERE.