Since Donald Trump's election, Democrats have suddenly rediscovered the Constitution.

They now claim to be in love with the concept of separation of powers as a check on executive overreach.

Freedom of speech is no longer racism against the President, but is their ultimate form of patriotism. And in a stunning reversal from the last eight years, the Tenth Amendment is now their ultimate protection of states' rights.

Nowhere is the Left's change of heart more readily apparent than on the issue of immigration.

Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the responsibility to "establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization."

Despite this clear Constitutional mandate for the federal government to secure our nation and determine how immigrants would become citizens, Democrats in California's state legislature are considering turning the Golden State into a Sanctuary State.

Such actions would create a safe haven for an estimated 2.3 million illegal aliens, and would be in defiance of President Donald Trump's executive orders.

California lawmakers also want to provide taxpayer-funded lawyers for illegals facing deportation and curtail Trump's efforts to create a Muslim registry, even though Trump hasn't proposed such a registry.

In Sacramento, Democrats on the state Senate Public Safety Committee voted to prohibit their own state and local law enforcement from working with federal immigration authorities.

The city of San Francisco sued Trump on Tuesday, claiming that his interior enforcement executive order, which would cut funding from sanctuary cities, is unconstitutional and a "severe invasion of San Francisco's sovereignty," reports the AP.

The city receives $1.2 billion a year in Federal funding for services, and it isn't happy that the taxpayer dollar spigot is about to be turned off.

Only an hour after the president signed the order, Democrats including former attorney general Eric Holder, filed suit, claiming the Trump administration is violating the Tenth Amendment in enforcing federal immigration law.

I can't remember the last time I heard liberals citing the Tenth Amendment because it concerns states' rights -- something they're usually happy to ignore while they use the heavy hand of the Federal government to trample states and enforce rulings from the alphabet soup agencies of the executive branch.

Their sudden respect for the Constitution is especially rich since Obama's EPA treaded on states' powers with both their "Clean Power" and "Clean Water" plans. At the same time both of Obama's Attorneys General, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, refused to enforce federal immigration and drug laws that were already on the books.

In fact, Holder and company seemed to have had no problem with ignoring and violating vast swaths of our founding documents for eight years.

Liberals didn't care when Obama "imposed punitive fines on those who choose not to buy health insurance or when he denied the most Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in history or when he used the FOIA fee system to favor friendly political groups," as Rare's Matt Purple notes. "They didn't care when Obama imposed onerous requirements on the refugee program in 2011 after it was discovered that two Iraqis who had been granted asylum were guilty of terrorism. Obama's order was far more limited than Trump's, but it did temporarily chill the resettlement of Iraqis in America: 18,251 came over in 2010, compared to 6,339 the next year."

Where were they, and their liberal protester friends, when President Obama carried out his unauthorized and unconstitutional wars throughout the Middle East? When Obama granted himself the authority to detain anyone for any reason at any time, did liberals protest in the streets? When his drone strikes destroyed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan, where was the outcry?

They were silent when Obama attempted to ostracize Fox News, when he "he literally tried to obtain a warrant against a Fox reporter under the Espionage Act or when he harvested two months' worth of phone records from the Associated Press," as Rare's Matt Purple points out.

States, cities, and local authorities should have wide latitude to decide what sorts of laws they wish to pass or enforce, but they do not have a constitutional right to simply ignore federal immigration law.

While it is refreshing to hear the Left argue that states should be able to decide something on their own, we should not forget that these are the same people who for eight years pretended the only authority in the land was derived from the executive in the White House.

Rep. Dave Brat represents Virginia's 7th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives.