Scalise: Illegals Bragging They Have COVID Can Enter U.S., But Americans Can’t Return Without Proof They’re COVID-Free
By Craig Bannister | July 29, 2021 | 3:59pm EDT
Americans are furious at President Joe Biden’s double-standard when it comes protecting the U.S. from the threat of people with COVID entering the country, House Republican Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) says.
During a Thursday press event, Scalise said Americans want Biden to take responsibility for the border crisis and COVID threat the president has created.
Illegal aliens with COVID aren’t just entering the country, they’re actually bragging about how the Biden Administration is welcoming them into the U.S. and allowing them to become super-spreaders:
“When they look at this crisis at the border that Joe Biden created: Joe Biden himself is the one who ended the agreements with Mexico and with the Northern Triangle countries that were working to ebb the flow of illegals coming into our country. And what are we seeing now?
“It's not just thousands of people a day coming across our border – it’s thousands of people bragging that they have COVID and being welcomed in, given plane tickets and bus tickets to go and be super-spreaders all across America. We're seeing the numbers. The Border Patrol agents are telling us this.”
Scalise said that the administration’s chief coronavirus expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, is “actually acknowledging that Biden is violating his own health guidance at the border while he's telling American families to alter their lifestyle.”
Yet, while COVID-infected illegal aliens are being welcomed into the U.S., the Biden Administration is requiring American citizens to prove their COVID-free if they want to come home from a vacation in Mexico, Scalise said:
“If you've got a family in America right now that's getting ready to go on vacation in Mexico, which many are doing. Do you know that if you're in Mexico as an American citizen and you want to come back home, according to the CDC, you cannot even board the plane to come back to America, as an American citizen, unless you produce a COVID negative test? That's the law.“Yet, if you come across our border illegally bragging that you have COVID, you're welcomed in.”
Americans are beginning to see the Biden Administrations hypocrisy, and they’re incensed, Scalise said:
“What kind of law and policy is that by the Biden Administration? It makes absolutely no sense, and people are figuring this out. People are furious about it. We're furious about it. And we're going to be fighting to get sanity and normal, commonsense policies back in Washington.”
Exclusive–Kobach: Biden Aids and Abets the Spread of COVID While Demanding Americans Get Vaccinated
At the very moment that President Biden and his administration are ratcheting up pressure on Americans to get vaccinated, they are flooding the country with illegal aliens—an alarming percentage of whom are infected with COVID-19.
As Breitbart reported, on Monday a group of illegal aliens including a mother and some children turned up in La Joya, Texas, at a Whataburger restaurant coughing and sneezing and infected with COVID-19.
How did they get there? They had entered illegally and were subsequently turned loose by the Border Patrol, whose agents have been forced to process illegal aliens into the country by President Biden, rather than keep illegal aliens out, as federal law requires. Not only were the illegal aliens spreading COVID-19 around the Whataburger restaurant, they were also spreading it at a local hotel that had been completely booked by Catholic Charities to house illegal aliens.
Biden’s Border Patrol doesn’t test illegal aliens in its custody for COVID. And the aliens certainly aren’t asked to get vaccinated. Biden is more concerned with forcing American citizens to get vaccinated.
This must be an aberration—Biden has to be taking steps to stop COVID-infected aliens from spreading into the country, right? Wrong. In fact, Biden’s policies have opened up the nation’s interior to illegal aliens infected with COVID-19.
Just inside the border, many Border Patrol checkpoints—which are on highways and are intended to stem the flow of illegal aliens into the country—are being shut down. The Border Patrol agents who would otherwise be working those checkpoints are too busy processing illegal aliens into the country. According to my sources in Texas law enforcement, the Border Patrol checkpoints near Las Cruces, New Mexico, near Marfa, Texas, and near El Paso, Texas, have all been shut down recently.
And once they get further into the country, the illegal aliens need not worry about ICE. Biden has forced ICE to stand down. Biden’s guidelines have drastically restricted ICE’s ability to deport illegal aliens. Under the new guidelines, it’s extraordinarily difficult for ICE officers to remove anyone who is not a convicted aggravated felon, a member of a gang, or a terrorist.
Biden didn’t have to abolish ICE. He just ordered ICE to stop deporting people.
Unlike President Biden, Texas Governor Greg Abbot sees the health risks of sending tens of thousands of illegal aliens carrying COVID-19 into the interior of the country every month. On Wednesday, he issued an emergency executive order noting that “busloads of migrants, an unknown number of whom are infected with COVID-l9, are being transported to communities across the State of Texas.”
Abbott accordingly ordered officers of the Texas Department of Public Safety to stop any vehicle on reasonable suspicion that it is carrying illegal aliens who may be infected with COVID-19, reroute them back to the border, and impound the vehicle.
If only President Biden shared the same sense of urgency. But he’s too busy forcing Americans to get vaccinated.
Kris W. Kobach served as the Secretary of State of Kansas during 2011-2019. An expert in immigration law and policy who was an informal adviser to President Trump, he also coauthored the Arizona SB-1070 immigration law. He is currently representing five Texas sheriffs and an association of ICE officers who are suing the Biden Administration over its violation of laws requiring the deportation of illegal aliens. His website is kriskobach.com.
Drunk on Power’: Republican Lawmakers Bash Nancy Pelosi’s Order to Arrest Maskless Staff, Visitors On Capitol Grounds
Many House Republicans announced plans to defy House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “unlawful and tyrannical” order to have staff and visitors who are not wearing masks on Capitol Grounds arrested.
In a bulletin, first posted to Twitter by Rep. Kat Cammack (R-FL) on Thursday, Pelosi (D-CA) ordered Capitol Police officers to enforce the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, which were updated on Tuesday and recommend even vaccinated people wear masks in indoor spaces.
“In today’s edition of Pelosi’s abuse of power, Capitol Police have been directed to arrest staff and visitors to comply with her mask mandate for vaccinated individuals,” Cammack’s tweet reads. “For Members, they advise not arresting but ‘reporting Members to SAA for their failure to comply.’”:
“If a visitor or staff member fails to wear a mask after a request is made to do so, the visitor or staff shall be denied entry to the House Office Buildings or House-side of the U.S. Capitol,” the bulletin states. “Any person who fails to either comply or leave the premises after being asked to do so would be subject to an arrest for unlawful entry…” (emphasis added).
While officers were ordered not to arrest House members or staffers accompanying them, officers have been directed to report them to House Sergeant at Arms’ office. According to the bulletin, the Office of Attending Physician (OAP) advised Congress to follow the CDC’s updated guidance. Chief of Police J. Thomas Manger signed off on the order.
“This is so out of control. Pelosi is massively drunk on power, obsessed with control, and hypocritical and partisan beyond belief,” Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) said in a tweet. “This isn’t just some mask mandate either. The enforcement measures are absurd. *There are now just 27 COVID-19 patients in ALL DC hospitals.”:
Pelosi’s arrest order comes after House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) delivered an impassioned speech on the House floor on Wednesday, in which he specifically targeted Pelosi for her blatant “hypocrisy” after she “broke her own rules” following a new mask mandate for the U.S. House of Representatives.
“Today, the Speaker, who didn’t know even know her own science and said names to people, broke her own rules,” McCarthy said, referring to when Pelosi called him a moron. “Twice today I saw the Speaker in a crowded room without a mask, less than 24 hours after imposing the mask mandate…”
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) noted that “in Biden-Pelosi’s America the maskless are arrested while the looters, shoplifters, and border crossers go free.”
Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) said Pelosi has “lost her damn mind,” and emphasized that the Capitol “is the People’s House, not her House.”
“Let me make it easy for you, Speaker Pelosi, my office, and my visitors won’t comply — have an issue with that? Come see me,” he concluded in a tweet:
“This is INSANE. Might as well come into my office and arrest my entire staff. We are not wearing masks. I support the Capitol Hill Police, but the Chief of Police made a mistake here. The physician and the chief of police don’t have this authority,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) tweeted:
Cammack issued a second tweet, announcing that she will refuse to comply with a mandate that is “based on an unpublished, failed peer review study conducted in India.”
Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI) sounded the alarm on Congress’ use of the unpublished, India-based study on Wednesday, the day after CDC released its updated guidance. McCarthy also slammed Pelosi for using research that has not even been approved in the United States to make House members wear masks again.
“I just left speaking with Dr. Monahan from the House. He said he used the CDC recommendation on a report that hasn’t been printed yet,” McCarthy said. “He did not know that the report is based upon India, about a vaccine that’s not approved in America, and now he did not know that it didn’t even pass peer-review.”
“That’s why vaccinated people in this house now have to wear a mask. There is no science, but I guess the Speaker must have not known that. Why wouldn’t the Speaker know the facts? Do you know what frustrates Americans the most? Hypocrisy,” he continued.
Rep. Claudi Tenney (R-NY) said Pelosi’s “political theater is only aimed at distracting from her radical agenda.”
Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) said Pelosi’s order is “about power and control.”:
“This is insanity. Threatening arrest for not wearing a mask is unlawful and tyrannical!” Rep. Andy Biggs joined in:
According to the bulletin, the order will remain in effect until December 31, 2021.
New US coronavirus surge is growing faster than the spring and summer waves of 2020
A horrific new surge of COVID-19 cases is sweeping across the US, driven by the highly contagious and deadly Delta variant of the virus as well as the reactionary response of the government at the federal and state levels.
The count of daily cases in the US reached 92,405 on Thursday, approximately the same peak number during the surge in spring when vaccinations stood at just 20 percent of the population. Meanwhile, both hospitalizations and deaths are rising again.
The seven-day averages of all three metrics show a precipitous increase across the US as the Delta variant is targeting unvaccinated sections of the population. According to the health sciences news website STAT, the month of July has seen the fastest increase in cases in the US since last winter. In an analysis published on Monday, STAT said a new analysis of COVID-19 case data “reveals this new wave is already outpacing the spring and summer waves of 2020.”
STAT’s analysis brings together data from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University and Our World in Data, along with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data to calculate the rate of weekly case acceleration. The new method measures the rate at which the daily number of cases is speeding up nationally and by each state.
STAT points to the alarming situation, “This view of the data reveals that the United States is currently in the midst of a fifth wave of cases and that this new wave is growing faster than the first and second waves ... ”
In response to the surge, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued new, thoroughly inadequate recommendations on Tuesday, calling for mask wearing, including by vaccinated individuals. The CDC itself was responsible for many states completely removing any mask requirements in May when it said that vaccinated people did not need to wear masks.
The policy of the CDC was in direct defiance of the warnings being made by leading epidemiologists who said that another catastrophic wave was imminent. For example, on March 7, Michael Osterholm said on NBC’s Meet the Press, “Let me just say we are in the eye of the hurricane right now... So right now, we do have to keep America as safe as we can from this virus, by not letting up on any of the public health measures we've taken, and we need to get people vaccinated as quickly as we can.”
The STAT analysis shows that states with the fastest expansion of the pandemic—such as Louisiana, Florida, Missouri, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas—have vaccination rates below the national average.
Of the situation in Louisiana, where only 36 percent of the population has been vaccinated, the STAT report showed the highest rate of case acceleration of any state. Louisiana, Florida and Arkansas have case acceleration rates that are many multiples of the rates of three-quarters of the other states.
A report in the Texas Tribune on Thursday said that hospital officials worry that the “staggering and frightening” hospitalization rates are pushing facilities to capacity while “staffing is short and workers are exhausted.” Some hospitals in rural Texas are reaching capacity and are on high alert. The Tribune report said, “hospitalizations in Bexar County rose by nearly 8 percent” in one night as “almost 100 people were admitted with severe COVID to local facilities on Tuesday alone.”
Meanwhile, the report went on, “In Dallas County, COVID hospitalizations have increased by 99 percent over the past two weeks, reaching 376 earlier this week. The local numbers are expected to hit between 800 and 1,000 by mid-August, according to forecasters at UT-Southwestern Medical Center,” and, “the rising hospitalizations rates have spread outside of the heavily populated metro areas that first began to report increases a few weeks ago. Now they are being seen in all corners of the state, triggering pleas from hospitals for state-backed staffing help to handle the increasing pressure.”
As July 27, 43.4 percent of Texans had been vaccinated. Texas was one of the first states to remove all restrictions, including its mask mandate, last March. Republican Governor Greg Abbott said at the time, “With this executive order, we are ensuring that all businesses and families in Texas have the freedom to determine their own destiny.”
In Arkansas, Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson declared a public health emergency on Thursday as the state recorded 2,843 new cases and one of the largest single day increases since the beginning of the pandemic. Hutchinson said that the White House was sending federal assistance to help bring health care workers into the state to staff medical facilities handling the surge.
Arkansas has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the US at approximately 35 percent. While the governor is calling for a special legislative session to overturn a law that he signed himself in April that prohibits state and local mask mandates, he also said there would not be another statewide mask rule or new restrictions on business.
In Missouri, statewide hospitalizations for COVID-19 have more than doubled and the number of ICU patients has more than tripled since the beginning of June. A report in the St. Louis Post Dispatch on Wednesday said that there is alarming increase in the number of cases among children under the age of 12 in Southwest Missouri.
The Post-Dispatch report quoted Springfield-Greene County Health Director Katie Towns who said, “We’ve seen a rise in cases in that 0-11 age group, and we’ve also seen outbreaks in settings like day cares and camps. We’ve moved to prioritize those types of cases so we can hopefully control disease spread among those who are most vulnerable.” The vaccination rate in Missouri is 41.1 percent.
Projections by the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub predict that the nationwide surge will accelerate throughout the remainder of the summer and into the fall before peaking in mid-October. The hub’s “ensemble” projection combines ten different models from academic institutions and outlines four scenarios based on the Delta variant's spread and US vaccination rates.
The model predicts approximately 60,000 cases and 850 deaths each day in the US. The model forecasts that the death rate will drop to approximately 300 per day, the current death level in the US. This means that somewhere between 100,000 and 120,000 Americans will die from the coronavirus between now and the end of the year.
Justin Lessler, PhD, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill who is on the scenario consortium, responded to the severity of these projections. “What’s going on in the country with the virus is matching our most pessimistic scenarios. We might be seeing synergistic effects of people becoming less cautious in addition to the impacts of the Delta variant.”
The present surge—along with the previous waves of the pandemic that have now killed more than 600,000 people in the US and more than 4 million internationally—is the responsibility of the capitalist ruling elites and their political representatives in the Democratic and Republican parties who have, from the beginning, placed the accumulation of wealth above the health of the public.
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