Trump's 'America First' Subverted, Billions Recommitted In Foreign 'Aid'

P. Gardner Goldsmith | September 5, 2018
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In a story that has received little US media attention, The Indepenent.UK reported last week that the Trump Administration has turned away from a vow to stop $3.5 billion in aid.

Mr. Trump previously attempted to slash billions of dollars in foreign aid from the 2018 fiscal year budget, as part of his “America First” agenda. Congress shot down this plan, passing a budget that kept levels of foreign aid spending similar to the year before.

So, since the President doesn’t have a “line item veto”, and it included all kinds of things he wanted to fund – like military expenditures -- he signed the bill towards the end of the “last fiscal year” (that’s jargon for, “We politicians are enslaving you and your progeny indefinitely, and pretending to have a year-to-year fiscal ‘Budget’”).

And when President Trump said that he was going to withhold the funds, the fat-cats in the blimp-like State Department got all whiney and so did their big-government pals in the Senate.

Said the ever-inflated Democrat Patrick Lahey, Vice-Chairman of the Senate Appropriations (also known as tax-thievery and generational enslavement) Committee:

Rescinding funds that had been agreed to by Congress and signed into law by the President, in the waning days of the fiscal year, would have set a terrible precedent and harmed programs that further United States interests around the world.

Let’s stop right there.

Not only is it the height of arrogance for Lahey to scald public discourse with such boiling, greasy, insulting arrogance as the idea of him defining what is in the “national interest”, while utterly disregarding the fact that international aid is absolutely NOT mentioned in any enumerated power granted to Congress, it’s a true vice to claim the impossible: that he can define what is in the best interest of the taxpayers from whom he is snatching the loot.

This is the “national interest” the US Constitution was supposed to protect: the interests of the citizens to decide for themselves how to value the fruits of their labor and where to spend those proceeds. And it is this “interest” which the Constitution has failed to defend against marauders like Leitmotif Lahey.

As a little reminder to Patty the Leftist, let’s turn to a guy who lived a few years closer to the signing of the supposed rulebook of the US government, Congressman David Crockett.

In his famous 1828 speech called “Not Yours To Give”, delivered on the floor of Congress, Crockett reminded his fellow members that they had not the constitutional power to allocate any federal money (itself snatched from taxpayers) to pay for anything that was not specifically enumerated to Congress.

He had learned his lesson, explaining that in his first term, he and his fellow Congressmen had seen a terrible fire in Georgetown, and voted to give money to some of the victims to help them rebuild. But, upon campaigning back in Tennessee, he ran into a farmer who reminded him that his actions were not sanctioned by the Constitution. Crockett employed the story on the floor as a way to tell his fellow politicians that a bill they were considering – to pay the widow of a naval vet extra money over and above what her husband had been promised and received for fighting – was not in their power during a time of non-War.

Crockett recalled the farmer as saying about his Georgetown “charity” act:

Individual members may give as much of their own money as they please, but they have no right to touch a dollar of the public money for that purpose.

And Crockett convinced his associates that their new plan was unconstitutional, adding:

Every man in this House knows it is not a debt (to the naval officer). We cannot, without the grossest corruption, appropriate this money as the payment of a debt. We have not the semblance of authority to appropriate it as charity. Mr. Speaker, I have said we have the right to give as much money of our own as we please. I am the poorest man on this floor. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week’s pay to the object, and if every member of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks.

Thanks to his reminder, the proposal failed, and private charity was taken up.

That, Mr. Lahey, is how people show their “interests”. It doesn’t take long to figure out.

And Mr. Trump still has a chance to show Mr. Lahey what this means. Despite having signed the bill into “law”, he not only can, but has sworn an oath to, not execute unconstitutional actions. If he is to be bound by that oath, he can -- he must -- not spend that money. He is obligated, and if Senators like Pat Lahey don’t like it, Pat can tap some of his pals in the Congress to try to impeach the President for it.

Of course, this is all based on the theory that any of that Constitution actually applies to them. I never signed the thing, and neither did you.

But the politicians in DC and the bureaucratic parasites they appoint to eat out our sustenance swear those oaths...

Wouldn’t it be nice if they acted a bit more honestly, a bit more like David Crockett, instead of thieves who keep trying to push Trump into uncomfortable corners and send our cash all over the planet, even as they claim it’s in out “interest”?

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