Back in the 1790s, there was a vigorous debate in Congress about whether to make a small appropriation of foreign aid to the French colony of Santo Domingo, which had experienced a slave revolt that generated about 2,000 refugees to the U.S. Not wanting to have more refugees (sounds familiar, no?) was the reason for sending money to help stabilize the island. But Congress in those days took its constitutional limits seriously, and there was resistance to making a foreign aid appropriation that wasn’t clearly authorized by the enumerated legislative powers in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.
But the Washington Administration thought the aid sufficiently useful that Washington and Congress (one suspects the fine hand of Hamilton somewhere in the background) designated the appropriation not as “foreign aid,” but as repayment of Revolutionary War debt owed to France.
Today there is no such restraint, and one has to wonder just what we get for some of these foreign aid amounts, like $1.8 billion to Ethiopia, $1.2 billion to Somalia, etc. And since we give Jordan and Egypt over $3 billion, surely we can insist they take some Gaza “refugees.” Call them “migrants,” if you want, and I’ll bet Trump can contrive to call it repayment for American “loans” to those countries that they thought they got for free.
