Republicans must get tough and seize the nation's purse strings to successfully fight President Barack Obama's expected use of executive power to grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens, former Rep. Allen West says.
"The Republicans need to find their big boy pants. That's what they need to do," West, a Florida Republican and retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, said Wednesday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
Newsmax TV.
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"You cannot let this go because you're talking about a fundamental demographic shift and an economic catastrophe for the U.S.
right now and you're talking to the disrespect of our Constitution.
"The most important thing that can immediately be done between the House and the Senate in January 2015 is to not fund any of the agencies that are responsible for allowing illegal immigrants to get these work permits and not have to face deportations."
West said it is clear from the Constitution's Article I, Section 8 clause that the president does not have that enumerated power to grant amnesty.
"Congress are the only ones that can make rules of laws in matters of naturalization," he said.
"[Americans] don't support it, especially after what happened this summer when you had tens of thousands of illegals standing across the border and now they have been dispersed all over the country.
"The American people want to get back to work, they don't want to see all of a sudden an influx of illegals that they're going to be responsible for because they're going to get on the taxpayer's role for welfare benefits and things of that nature."
West — author of
"Guardian of the Republic: An American Ronin's Journey to Faith, Family and Freedom", written with Michele Hickford and published by Crown Forum — said he was disturbed by Obama's calm response to the slaughter of five rabbis, three of them American, by Hamas terrorists at a Jerusalem synagogue on Tuesday.
"We're coming off a beheading of an American and now we just had three Americans brutally killed, assaulted while they were praying in the synagogue in Jerusalem and that's a very calm response," West said.
The other thing is we continue to hear this classification of extremism. We don't say Islamic terrorism and we don't say jihadism.
"It's as if we're trying to wish this problem away and reclassify it in a means that is very comforting and accommodating to us."
West said the Obama administration is clueless as to the disturbing trend of the Palestinian culture to glorify the killing of Jews.
"We continue to see that coming out of the administration where they don't understand that [Palestinian Authority President] Mahmoud Abbas is the leader of a gang called Fatah," he said.
"Fatah originally comes from the Palestinian Liberation Organization of Yasser Arafat. They were the original terrorists. Abbas is going into a reconciliation tact agreement with Hamas."
On the sweeping Republican victories in Senate and House races across the country, West told Steve Malzberg:
"The midterm election was an initial indicator that the American people are starting to focus on policies. When the president said his policies were on the ballot, a lot of Americans started to think about how they're suffering," he said.
"They're not working full-time at jobs, their healthcare insurance premiums are going up, we see a lack of a strong resolve with the national security and we're decimating our military capability capacity.
"So the American people are saying we need to get this thing back on the right track. We got to be responsible in honoring our rule of law, the Constitution."