By Adam Andrzejewski for RealClearPolicy
On April 15, 2013, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev murdered three people and injured more than 250 others in the horrific Boston Marathon bombing. Seven years later, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev collected a Covid stimulus check in federal prison.
For his role in orchestrating the bombing, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to several life sentences in federal prison, as well as the death penalty (though the death penalty sentence was vacated and is currently under review by the US Supreme Court).
So why is Tsarnaev receiving stimulus checks from the U.S. government?
In March of 2020, Congress passed the CARES Act, which included provisions to send $1,400 stimulus checks to all citizens making less than $75,000 filing individually or $150,000 filing jointly. This included felons.
Some Republicans like Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) raised the issue and forced a vote to amend the CARES Act to exclude felons from receiving stimulus money, but it ultimately failed, and felons were included. This means that in addition to Tsarnaev, the likes of Dylan Roof, who murdered nine African Americans at Charleston’s Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015, also received stimulus checks.
Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that a judge ordered Tsarnaev’s stimulus check be seized and put towards the $10.1 million in criminal restitution he owes his victims. So far, he has paid just over $2,000 of that $10 million, despite having an additional personal trust account with a balance of over $3,000.
While there is plenty of healthy debate to be had regarding the efficacy of the stimulus checks, one thing most people should be able to agree on is that murderers like Tsarnaev should not receive federal aid financed by your tax dollars and ever-increasing government debt.
Syndicated with permission from Real Clear Wire.
The #WasteOfTheDay is presented by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.