WHEN Did Coronavirus Begin in the U.S.? and Why It Matters

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The entire political focus of yesterday’s news cycle was the legislative imbroglio between Republicans and Democrats over the coronavirus rescue package. Republicans believe we should presuppose and even continue encouraging an indefinite shutdown while spending trillions to treat it. Democrats believe the same thing and also want to add all their other extraneous progressive policies too. But nobody is asking: Do we really need to intensify the shutdown before we understand the data and projections of the actual virus itself?

Given that the virus was discovered in Wuhan on November 17 (at the latest), when did coronavirus really begin in this country? Roughly how many cases do we think occurred before we began testing during the first week in March, and how many fatalities occurred? How many of the presumed flu deaths, and particularly the presumed pneumonia deaths during what was thought of as a bad flu season, were really due to coronavirus?

These are not mere academic questions. They should determine our public policy response. Knowing when the virus began and what we think occurred in January and February (and perhaps even December) will help determine not only how severe this virus is, but how far along we are into the epidemic. If we really had hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of cases, along with several thousand more fatalities prior to testing, that would mean that the mortality rate is even lower than the 1.2% post-testing average so far. It would also mean we are farther along in the epidemic and that many have already been exposed to it, thereby making a categorical and nationwide lockdown counterintuitive at this point.

What led our government and the governments of many other countries into panic was a single Imperial College of U.K. study, funded by global warming activists, that predicted 2.2 million deaths if we didn’t lock down the country. In addition, the reported 8-9% death rate in Italy scared us into thinking there was some other mutation of this virus that they got, which might have come here. Together with the fact that we were finally testing and had the ability to actually report new cases, we thought we were headed for a death spiral. But again, as my colleague Steve Deace pointed out, we can’t flatten a curve if we don’t know when the curve started. . .

You see an insanely dangerous trajectory of cases taking off in March. But what exactly happened in March? The virus was introduced in Wuhan in November. And even without testing, we did detect a handful of cases here, the first known case being on January 21. So why would we suddenly experience the outbreak in March? It’s quite evident that the culprit for the spike in the chart is simply because that is when the testing began because Trump dropped the FDA regulation barring private testing after the government testing didn’t work.

Thus, we know with certainty that people were clearly contracting coronavirus and were likely dying some time before March, but we’re still not sure how long before or how many people. Given the overlap with the general flu and pneumonia season, we really have no way of knowing that the January 21 case of the individual flying from Wuhan to Spokane, Washington, was the first active case – patient zero.

It’s truly inconceivable that it would take so long for the virus to come here after it broke out in China in November. We likely had hundreds of thousands of travelers coming here and countless tens of thousands of Chinese nationals flying back even before Customs and Border Protection introduced any health care screening per CDC guidance on January 17. There are roughly 3.4 million Chinese admissions every year, not counting the numerous Americans who fly there and back. If we divide that by six to account for a two-month period before Trump shut off travel but after the virus had developed in Wuhan, that would be nearly 600,000 Chinese nationals.

It’s safe to say that as January wore on, the numbers likely dropped a lot from the Chinese side, but it’s still a statistical improbability that the virus wasn’t brought in earlier and in greater numbers than CDC has thus far detected and documented. Moreover, Chinese students in particular, including those from Wuhan, traveled back in mid-January for the new semester.

As Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of Trump’s coronavirus response task force, said yesterday of the spread in New York City, “Clearly the virus had to have been circulating for a number of weeks in order to have this level of penetrance in the community.”

If some of the pneumonia cases and deaths earlier this year were from coronavirus, that would mean that the death rate is much lower than predicted. Even the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was the ultimate petri dish of recycled air circulating an infection, with an elderly population, experienced a 1.25% fatality rate. New York, which seems to be, by far, the worst hot spot now, has a mortality rate hovering between 0.75% and 0.80%, and it is going down as they test more cases. That compares to 1.2% nationwide, which helps show that wherever we test and identify the virus, the numbers go way up, but the mortality goes down.

According to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, New York accounts for 25 percent of the nation’s testing. That means if every other state tested a larger sample of those who actually have the virus, their death rates would likely be as low as New York’s. This is what we are seeing in Germany, which tested more people than any other Western country, but has a mortality rate of 0.3%, despite having almost as large a proportion of seniors as Italy.

A mortality rate of 0.75% would still be three times higher than H1N1, which is very serious, but does it warrant a nationwide shutdown indefinitely, with governors closing school for the remainder of the year and others, like Gov. Cuomo, taking about this going on for nine months? Given the evidence in front of us on the mortality rate, the fact that so many more likely have had it or were exposed to it, and the fact that the Asian countries are already getting over the worst of it, why would we continue destroying our economy without studying more data? Why pass bankrupting legislation presupposing such a long-term shutdown? Even in Italy, the virus is showing signs of peaking after four weeks.

Shouldn’t this be the top debate item in Congress, given that the truth behind these questions will determine our needed fiscal response? Let’s face it, either way, Congress’ proposals will bankrupt us, but if our governments continue demanding indefinite lockdown, no amount of money in the world could solve this problem.

What about Italy? Why is its mortality rate so high? Some have suggested that it’s due to the high elderly population, but that doesn’t explain why the Diamond Princess had elderly mortality rates in line with the rest of the world. I don’t have the answer to that, but a plausible theory has been offered by Prof. Walter Ricciardi, scientific adviser to Italy’s minister of health, that Italy is overcounting deaths. “On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity – many had two or three,” said Ricciardi, according to the U.K. Telegraph.

Remember, Germany has just a 0.3% fatality rate, and Israel has just 1 death out of nearly 1,700 cases. Germany’s demographic is almost as old as Italy’s, while Israel’s demographic is young. Thus, other factors are at play here.

Clearly, we need answers before we destroy our way of life and our economy indefinitely. Yet these are the only answers the bipartisan cabal in Washington is uninterested in discovering.

Here’s the ultimate question they need to answer: What would be the value added for locking down all Americans rather than allowing most healthy Americans in most parts of the country to go back to work by next week with proper precautionary measures? Where is their evidence that, given the virus has already been in the country for months, further lockdown will save more lives and that the economic depression won’t cost more lives? In order to answer those questions, we need more information on how we got here. (For more from the author of “When Did Coronavirus Begin in the U.S.? and Why It Matters” please click HERE)

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With so Many Americans Hurting, Trump Must Cancel the H-1B Visa Lottery

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Nothing demonstrates the darkness of the liberal agenda in the shutting down of America’s economy than the push for more foreign labor. If they are saying we need to spend trillions of dollars to help hurting Americans who are out of jobs, you’d think it would be a no-brainer to cancel foreign worker visas, not talk about increasing them.

This week, President Trump has an opportunity to draw a bold contrast on rebuilding the country with American labor. The H-1B visa program and its lawless sister program, Optional Practical Training (OPT) work permits, have gerrymandered Americans out of entry-level white-collar jobs – from programming and engineering to pharmacy and nursing. They are also responsible for creating a brain gain for countries like China at our expense, leading to the offshoring that is exacerbating our crisis in the medical supply chain. Now is the time for Trump to finally end these visas, and next week he has the perfect mechanism to do so.

Every year, the government holds an H-1B lottery on April 1, in which USCIS randomly selects 85,000 foreign visa applicants to take basic white-collar jobs from Americans. Along with those visa winners are their spouses, who are given H-4 visas. Through a lawless administrative loophole, every year roughly 50,000 of the spouses wind up also receiving employment authorization documents enabling them to compete with American workers.

With everything being canceled for Americans, isn’t it prudent to cancel the lottery to bring in more foreign workers? Even before the crisis, 71 percent of jobs in Silicon Valley went to foreign workers, and 74% of American STEM graduates overall failed to land jobs in STEM fields. “Let’s be clear – these workers were never needed, and the law has never required employers asking for white-collar contract workers to show that they couldn’t find U.S. workers,” said Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies in an interview with CR. “Most of these workers are brought in because they are cheaper, not because of a labor shortage or skills gap. They have already directly displaced hundreds of thousands of U.S. workers over the years.”

Vaughan noted that now is the perfect time to end the racket. “Now, the case for them is even thinner, with forecasts of double-digit unemployment rates due to the response to the pandemic,” said Vaughan, who has been studying this issue for decades. “How can anyone argue with a straight face that we need [foreign] workers of any kind right now, with so many American businesses shutting down?”

Shockingly, page 64 of Nancy Pelosi’s 1,100-page pandemic panic bill contains a provision extending H-1B work permits for 100,000 foreign workers for three years. You read that right. The very same people who are now going overboard and mandating unconstitutional shutdowns of all businesses, even those that don’t engender public gatherings, are now replacing us with foreign workers. It’s rooted in the same perverted ideology as placing Americans under house arrest, but releasing criminals from prison.

The combination of these actions taken by the Left demonstrates that this is not being done out of prudence to contain the spread of an epidemic, but as a means of putting law-abiding American taxpayers and workers last at every turn.

Trump can end this racket by simply canceling the lottery this year and preventing the importation of 85,000 new foreign workers at a time when every job will matter to Americans. Moreover, he should cancel the unauthorized OPT program, which allows hundreds of thousands of foreign students who graduate in American universities to take American jobs without costing employers payroll taxes.

The need to further incentivize companies to hire Americans comes out of news reported by investigative journalist Paul Sperry last week that Wells Fargo and Bank of America are facing severe worker shortages. Why? Because India shut down its offices, and Indian workers don’t have the telecommuting capabilities that most Americans do. This problem will spread, because India just announced a nationwide lockdown for three weeks. Now would be a perfect time to cut off the foreign worker visa-to-outsourcing pipeline and rebuild these companies with American workers – and protect our supply chains to boot.

At the same time, the politicians are pushing for more H-2B low-skilled visas as well. DHS Secretary Chad Wolf announced a 35,000 expansion of H-2B visas on March 5, pursuant to unlimited authorization DHS was granted by Congress to raise the caps. But it’s not too late to pull them back. Republicans must shut off these visas in whatever bill they wind up passing the Senate.

One thing is clear: liberals can’t have it both ways. They can’t push endless redistribution of wealth during a potential great depression under the guise of helping workers and then bring in more foreign workers to take jobs. It’s time for Trump to call them out on it and use his authority to end the sellout of the American worker once and for all. (For more from the author of “With so Many Americans Hurting, Trump Must Cancel the H-1B Visa Lottery” please click HERE)

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It Took Chinese Coronavirus to Finally Make Illegal Immigration ILLEGAL

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Over 21,000 were flooding small-town American hospitals and stretching their resources to the limit. Agents were getting sick. They were also coming for surgeries, and we were paying for it. No, I’m not talking about Chinese coronavirus. I’m describing the public health crisis at our border thanks to what was essentially a court-driven invasion exactly this time last year. Yet our government refused to simply enforce our sovereignty, no matter how bad it got. It’s only now due to coronavirus that the DHS is finally enforcing our sovereignty.

Let’s face it: Most of our public policy is not directed by the rule of law but by the signaling of the media’s lack of virtue. The media, with their excessive panic-driven narrative, have driven governors to near-martial-law actions restricting movement of citizens. Thus, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) finally feels it has the ability to at least enforce our border laws against people who have no right to be here.

On Friday, the White House announced that all unauthorized aliens caught crossing illegally or coming without proper documentation will face immediate return to their home countries. No processing, no endless court cases, no detention, no games. Straight-up enforcement of our sovereignty. Why exactly can’t we expect our government to do that all the time?

Last year, I must have written several dozen articles detailing the president’s inherent constitutional and delegated authority to turn away those who seek entry to this country under any circumstance. Yet no matter how bad the situation got for America’s security, including the straining of our hospitals and the concern of communicable diseases (4,200 exposed to mumps), one excuse after another was given as to why we somehow had to indulge bogus asylum claims.

It’s truly hard to understate the degree of public health crisis when you have 1 million people coming from third-world countries in Central America and elsewhere around the world, with hundreds of thousands of them being released into our country immediately without quarantine and incubation. We will never know how much of the resurgence in measles, mumps, whooping cough, and TB in this country is due to this and prior influxes. Yet the CDC never seemed to be concerned.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last March, former acting CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan said during his testimony, “Migrants travel north from countries where poverty and disease are rampant,” and large numbers of them “may have never seen a doctor, received immunizations, or lived in sanitary conditions.” Randy Howe, head of operations for CBP’s Office of Field Operations, testified that “their health can be aggravated by the physical toll of the journey.” He elaborated:

In many cases, they arrive at our southern border already exhibiting symptoms of a health issue. … Close quarters on trains and buses that smugglers procure for moving them through Mexico can hasten the spread of communicable diseases. All of these factors leave migrants vulnerable to serious medical complications.

Shockingly, we went another half a year through this massive influx without enforcing our sovereignty. It wasn’t until last week that Trump finally turned them back. The administration invoked 42 U.S. Code § 265 authority “to prohibit, in whole or in part, the introduction of persons and property from such countries or places as he shall designate in order to avert such danger” as communicable diseases.

A Washington Examiner report claimed CBP officers were continuing to let in nonessential persons at ports of entry despite the order to the contrary. Is this the deep state sabotaging the order?

I spoke with a senior DHS official and a White House policy official, and they both confirmed that, in general, the order is indeed being implemented. Illegal aliens without documentation are all being turned around immediately, and that includes the so-called unaccompanied alien minors. The only ones who are not being turned back immediately, according to my sources, are those who are not from Mexico or Central America. But even those are being flown back by ICE immediately to their home countries.

As for the travel between the ports of entry, my DHS source confirmed that nobody without documentation is being let through. “Yes, we are obviously trying to keep our commerce open, so if there is someone who works at a local McDonald’s, we definitely want to keep them working here. We use the same inspection standards that airports are using, no more, no less.”

Thus, conservatives should be pretty happy with the results at the border now. The issue is how long it took us to get here and whether this will continue. While Democrats are using coronavirus to remake America, this administration should at least use it to make illegal immigration illegal permanently. No more lawfare. (For more from the author of “It Took Chinese Coronavirus to Finally Make Illegal Immigration Illegal” please click HERE)

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15 Things Conservatives Must Demand in Return for Coronavirus Bailout Package

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One thing is certain: Nearly every Republican is going to join with the Democrats and the liberal elements of the administration to push numerous spending packages that could cost trillions of dollars when this is all done. They will not debate the merits of the provisions, try to better target them, or limit the cost. But conservatives should at least secure some policy victories for the American people that actually address the source of this health crisis in return for bankrupting us.

Congress already passed an $8.3 billion bill and is in the process of passing 12 weeks of tax credits for paid leave worth $105 billion, along with numerous increases in welfare programs. Democrats and Secretary Mnuchin already secured support for a third package that will bail out the airline industry among others and send $1,000 checks to every American, at a cost of $1 trillion. The administration is also asking for a discretionary spending package of $45.8 billion.

Well, if the bipartisan liberals are using this crisis to clinch their priorities, shouldn’t we at least widen the discussion to the actual policies that bring in viruses, stress our health system, and make us vulnerable to China while they are making us pay for the rope to hang ourselves?

The few remaining conservatives in Washington need to seize control of the narrative and should demand the following in return for support of the bailouts:

Immigration Policy

1. A limitation on Chinese visas and foreign students until benchmarks of transparency and cooperation are met by the communist Chinese government.

2. A permanent provision of law mandating the suspension of travel from source countries and secondary countries the moment our government becomes aware of the spreading of a dangerous virus.

3. A permanent provision of law stating that all immigration, refugee, and asylum processing must cease when there are restrictions on movement and commerce domestically. If it’s bad enough to restrict movement of Americans domestically, it should be severe enough to suspend immigration, which is more likely to transmit global epidemics across borders. With this epidemic, it took way too long to shut that down.

4. A provision addressing how China is using immigration to suck out all our research and development, a problem recognized in a recent bipartisan Senate committee report.

Maintain Order

5. More funding for federal prosecutors: There is a growing epidemic of major cities ordering police to stand down and not arrest criminals or for jails and prisons to begin releasing criminals. The mix of businesses remaining vacant with criminals roaming the streets has the potential to create a second order crisis. Once we are spending endless sums anyway, we should beef up the federal prosecutors’ offices for the next few months to serve as a backstop against the local jailbreak. If we are federalizing every aspect of our lives, we as may as well have the feds contribute to maintaining order, the core job of government.

Regulatory Policy

6. End ban on physician-owned hospitals: The biggest concern of our health care system, which is largely driving the push to restrict movement, is a lack of available bed space in hospitals. In general, we face a shortage in hospitals and affordable care due to the monopolies, mergers, and acquisitions of big health care conglomerates created under
Obamacare. One of the most onerous, yet forgotten provisions of Obamacare was the ban on physician-owned hospitals. That provision needs to end immediately so physicians can compete with the conglomerates while extending access to care. Doing so would immediately spawn a revolution in health care and stimulate the economy.

7. Make telehealth great: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have temporarily suspended regulations on telehealth as well as some of the draconian privacy restrictions under HIPAA. The laws should be changed permanently to accommodate the better use of technology and communications to expand access to health care.

8. End FDA bans on private testing: Everyone is talking about how government failed to deliver workable testing kits, which could have detected the virus earlier and flattened the curve of the spread quicker. What is less known is that government banned private labs from testing them. The minute Trump suspended that regulation, we had a boon of effective testing kits sprout up throughout the health care supply chain. It’s time this and similar regulations be permanently repealed.

9. End all unnecessary regulations that stifle the supply chain of vital goods and services, whether they are environmental or labor in nature. We need to keep supplies of all sorts flowing.

10. Medical Supply Chain Security Act: Pass Sen. Josh Hawley’s Medical Supply Chain Security Act, which would ensure that the FDA monitors and sources shortages of ingredients and materials needed for critical medical devices and drugs, while expedited approval of those items to go to market. Hawley is right to suggest that if we are going to bail out industries, we should demand answers about where they are going to make their products.

Fiscal Policy

11. Loans instead of bailouts: If we are going to bail out industries because of a lack of cash flow, then make it temporary and targeted, not permanent and indiscriminate. Ditto for small business loans from the Small Business Administration.

12. Offsets: While we will obviously not pay for the entire cost, conservatives should demand at least a veneer of pay-fors. Sen. Rand Paul’s idea of cutting foreign aid makes a lot of sense when our own country is experiencing such a crisis.

13. Refocus the mandate of NIH and CDC: The lead organizations dealing with public health crises have record cash, yet we are told they lack resources. Congress must reorient their mission away from fighting obesity and racism and make them strictly focused on public health management of crises that are too large for the states to deal with.

14. Index capital gains taxes to inflation and temporarily suspend other income taxes: As much as possible, the focus should be on cutting taxes, not handouts. Rather than bailing out Wall Street, we should borrow an idea Sen. Ted Cruz has pushed in the past to index the capital gains tax to inflation. This will inject more capital into the market. As much as possible, we should be encouraging work for those who can or must work or who can telecommute. Let’s face it, a $1,000 or $2,000 check for every American is enough to bankrupt our Treasury but is a paltry sum if it’s designed to replace several months of lost household income. Clearly, unless we are prepared to cut $50,000 checks to every American family, we have no choice but to balance encouragement of work with social distancing. The best way to do that, once we are going to suffer revenue losses anyway, is to slash taxes. We need a live economy to actually stimulate. You can’t stimulate a nuclear winter.

15. Sanction China: Finally, it’s time to divest and decouple from China. This begins by working with allies to sanction China until its government become more transparent about the source and timing of this disease. According to a study from Southampton University, there would have been a 95 percent reduction in coronavirus cases had China taken action and alerted the world three weeks earlier. Focusing a congressional response to this virus without dealing with China would be like focusing on 9/11 without studying the hijackers and al Qaeda.

Clearly, substantial sums of money will be spent in the coming weeks. But most of public policy is about finding the right policy solutions, not throwing money at a problem. If we are going to throw an unlimited amount of money at the problem, someone needs to be guarding the gates to ensure that we actually solve the policy problems and prevent this from happening in the future, while limiting the pain in the short run.

Finally, through all of this, we must remember that all the debt we pile up on top of the unfathomable debt we accrued during a time of prosperity will be owned by … China! (For more from the author of “15 Things Conservatives Must Demand in Return for Coronavirus Bailout Package” please click HERE)

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Schumer Is Right About SCOTUS and Abortion – Just Not the Way He Meant

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“To say that the departments of our government are co-ordinate is to say that the judgment of one of them is not binding upon the other two, as to the arguments and principles involved in the judgment. It binds only the parties to the case decided.” ~Edward Bates, attorney general under President Lincoln

Sen. Chuck Schumer might not realize it, but he inadvertently stumbled across the truth about the Supreme Court. Rather than focusing on the catfight of his war of words against Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, Republicans would be wise to call his bluff on concern over the power of the court and challenge him to join in a bipartisan effort to reduce the runaway powers of the judiciary.

Obviously, if Schumer had a gracious bone in his body, he would simply apologize for his remarks yesterday outside the Supreme Court building saying that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh “will pay the price” for any potential decision they make on abortion cases. In today’s political tinderbox, whether he meant it or not, his comments certainly sounded like a direct threat against the justices.

However, we should all take a step back and ponder why the atmosphere around Supreme Court politics has become so charged in recent years and what can be done to reverse the trend. Democrats are now providing us with the perfect opportunity.

Given how politics has become a blood sport, it’s no surprise that Supreme Court nominations, and now the lead-up to big court decisions, have become such a blood fest. Both parties have wrongly elevated the judiciary to the status of a tribunal super-legislature that can decide every single political and social question with finality. Schumer is 100 percent correct that courts should not decide the abortion issue. Conservatives should call his bluff and offer to take all abortion questions away from the judiciary, a power Congress can use over the courts any day of the week, and let state legislatures decide the issue.

Schumer is forgetting how this latest abortion case even got to the courts. It’s not a potential 5-4 “conservative majority” on the Supreme Court that is wading into the abortion issue. It’s lower courts that continue getting involved in this and other political issues that should be left to the political branches of states or the federal government. How about we keep federal judges out of overtly political issues altogether, and then Schumer won’t have to worry about the coming apocalypse of a supposedly conservative Supreme Court?

Here’s another irony lost on Schumer, one that conservatives should easily recognize. The Louisiana case before the Supreme Court right now, June Medical Services LLC v. Russo, actually demonstrates that Republican-appointed justices, aside from Clarence Thomas and maybe one other, will never overturn even recent expansions for abortion “rights,” much less the foundation of Roe and Casey.

The current case deals with Louisiana’s law requiring that abortion providers have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals within 30 miles of the abortion clinic. If you listened to the premise debated throughout the oral arguments on Wednesday, it was clear that the majority of the justices won’t even reverse the 2016 Hellerstedt decision, the ruling that states can’t “burden” abortion “rights” with certain health care regulations. The entire question they appeared to be debating was whether the Louisiana law could be justified under the Hellerstedt precedent.

As we’ve seen time and again, Roberts and Kavanaugh worship precedent, including even recent cases where Roberts dissented and Kennedy provided the fifth vote, as was the case in Hellerstedt. Once there is a majority behind an opinion, those two will almost always stick with the liberal precedent. Gorsuch and Alito are up in the air depending on the issue. Thomas is the only one who has made it clear he is always willing to reverse cases he believes were wrongly decided, even if they are 150 years old.

Here we are practically engaging in a civil war over the direction of the Supreme Court, when the only question is whether it will continue moving even further to the left or just maintain all of the liberal decisions it has promulgated until now. If Schumer is really concerned about this supposed right-wing court, let’s call his bluff and agree to limit the power of the judiciary altogether and stop it wielding such broad power over political issues.

Conservatives would be short-sighted not to turn the Democrats’ fear of a potential right-wing court into broad judicial reform. We only stand to benefit from keeping our political fights within the political branches.

For example, just yesterday, the Ninth Circuit finalized an injunction against Trump’s border policies, essentially demanding we bring in endless unvetted caravans during a time of global pandemic. Are we really to believe the courts have this power? If Democrats want to chant, “Keep your policies off my body,” shouldn’t we all chant to the Ninth Circuit, “Keep your policies off our sovereign borders”? It is our right to have a sovereign nation. What about a hashtag: “#OurRightOurDecision”?

Rather than spending the rest of the week feigning outrage over the attack on the much-vaunted “independent” judiciary, how about Republicans use this as the impetus for de-escalating the problem by de-emphasizing the power of the courts over the other branches?

Again, there is a kernel of truth to what the Democrats are saying. Republican judges shouldn’t have the final say over the most vital national questions. But neither should Democrat judges. In a republic, unelected courts don’t get to decide with finality broad political questions, stealing the sovereignty of the people, as Abraham Lincoln rightfully believed. That’s exactly why we need to make the courts boring again and keep both the lower courts and the Supreme Court out of political decisions. (For more from the author of “Schumer Is Right About SCOTUS and Abortion – Just Not the Way He Meant” please click HERE)

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Trump’s COVID-19 Response Will Make Or Break His 2020 Reelection Bid

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A week ago, Tucker Carlson warned that the outbreak of the novel coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China in 2019, COVID-19, could put Bernie Sanders in the White House. Carlson is right. President Trump’s response to COVID-19, rhetorical and actual, will make or break his presidency. . .

With Trump’s tweet, among others, came the general feeling that the White House wasn’t taking COVID-19 very seriously. Of course, Democrats and some in the media are attempting to use the virus for political gain. First, they said the Trump administration had cut coronavirus funding at the Centers for Disease Control—except that is totally untrue. Democrats have also tried to say that Vice President Mike Pence isn’t qualified to lead Trump’s coronavirus taskforce—except that Pence is incredibly qualified.

The White House response thus far hasn’t been perfect, however. There’s been a concerning trend of conservative pundits and TV doctors dismissing fears about COVID-19 as media-induced hysteria. TV doctors can rant all they want about how dumb it is for the public to react to the virus, but people have reason to be worried. Markets have a good reason to be worried as well. . .

All this is to say that the economic implications of COVID-19 are extremely serious. The stock market may bounce back quickly, but equities could keep going lower and the global economy could contract in 2020. . .

Yet the White House could be reacting even more strongly. Why should non-citizen Italians be able to fly to the United States from Italy while the virus is breaking out in that country, for example? Boris Johnson gets it. He’s set up a coronavirus “War Room.” (Read more from “Trump’s COVID-19 Response Will Make Or Break His 2020 Reelection Bid” HERE)

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Forgotten Issues in the Coronavirus Debate: Mass Migration and Offshoring to China

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This week, Congress will debate its reaction to the coronavirus. One hundred percent of the discussion will revolve around how much money to throw at HHS agencies already flush with record budgets, but nobody is discussing the biggest policy problem implicated during critical public health crises – mass migration and outsourcing to and from the very source countries of these outbreaks.

Immigration, when managed properly, at the right levels, from the right places, with prudent vetting and fostering of Americanization among the new arrivals, can enrich a country. But when done with no regard for American sovereignty and security, and through irresponsible and unchecked mass migration, it can be the biggest conduit for whatever global concerns we seek to avoid – whether drugs, cultural problems, espionage, terrorism, trade theft, or communicable diseases.

It is evident from both the 2003 SARS and 2020 coronavirus outbreaks that China cannot be trusted to keep these viruses in check or to be truthful and collaborative in containing them. Living with such a clear reality, why are policymakers not questioning the effect of bringing in hundreds of thousands of Chinese students and tens of thousands more on other visas every year? Why do we not clamp down on mass travel the minute there is a sense of a novel virus outbreak in China? Those are the questions policymakers should be grappling with this week.

Given the sheer number of Chinese students studying in our universities, an outcome the American people never voted for, how many countless thousands traveled back from school vacations in China when the new semester began in January? That coincided with the outbreak of the virus. What protocols were put in place to ensure they were not carrying the virus, or is such an effort even possible with such large numbers in a rush to get back for the new semester?

There are certainly a lot of terrific people who come here from China. But we can’t ignore the fact that the Chinese government is our biggest adversary and is using its diaspora of students, which flows into a pipeline of Chinese workers employed in sensitive industries and government research labs, as a means of stealing our expertise, data, and trade secrets and bringing it back home.

According to a bipartisan Senate Homeland Security subcommittee report, there are 10,000 Chinese nationals conducting research in the Department of Energy’s National Labs. The report found that agencies and departments conducting scientific research like the National Institutes of Health and the State Department do not “systematically track visa applicants linked to China’s talent recruitment plans.”

The report found that foreign-born researchers working for various U.S. scientific research agencies were being paid by China under the Thousand Talents Plan run by the communist government. It concludes, “American taxpayer funded research has contributed to China’s global rise over the last 20 years,” because it allowed China to go “from brain drain to brain gain.”

Just take the recent case of a Chinese national working for Coke in Atlanta. Just last month, Xiaorong “Shannon” You, a Chinese national, was indicted for stealing $100 million in trade secrets from six Coke vendors before she left the company. According to the FBI, this enabled her to win Chinese government funding to start a company making next-generation can coatings back in China.

As the Atlanta-Journal Constitution pointed out, “Chinese companies, individuals and agents steal between $225 billion and $600 billion a year in U.S. intellectual property ranging from copying designs to make knock-off handbags to pirated music and movies to corporate America’s most sensitive technologies, according to one outside estimate U.S. officials cite.”

It’s a fulfillment of what the Senate subcommittee report warned: how China, over the past generation, discovered that it’s “more efficient to allow its nationals to learn how to conduct research and develop cutting-edge technologies overseas and later find ways for these nationals to assist China.”

This is how China has been able to develop an army of people with American expertise to then work for these American or Chinese companies for a cheaper price overseas. Now, not only does China have an easy conduit to bring in communicable diseases to our country, but it has used it to stymie our ability to deal with such outbreaks properly, because most of our drug ingredients are made in, you guessed it, China!

On Friday, CNBC reported that the Food and Drug Administration announced its first drug shortage as a result of the coronavirus because so many of our drug manufacturers rely on ingredients made in China, but declined to name the drug. Again, the irony is lost on most policymakers that so many outbreaks occur in China, we bring in endless foreign students from China right during the outbreak in late December/early January, and the pipeline of Chinese students and workers is what has caused the very offshoring that makes us vulnerable during Chinese virus outbreaks!

The amazing thing is that senators will publish reports with findings smacking them in the face and indicting unbridled mass migration, yet they will never point the finger at the obvious culprit when the results become so painfully obvious during a time of a health epidemic. How could mass migration from China ever work for us when the politicians know how China is using it to scavenge America’s carcass?

No money in the world funneled to HHS can solve the problem of our de facto open-borders policy and the multiple ways China uses it against us. (For more from the author of “Forgotten Issues in the Coronavirus Debate: Mass Migration and Offshoring to China” please click HERE)

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Corona Causes Stupidity Pandemic – Among Democrats

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Politicians are known for exploiting tragedy, and no party has perfected this art more than Democrats. From shootings (name one and there’s always a Democrat there seeking to exploit it) to plane crashes (Paul Wellstone) and memorials (Elijah Cummings), Democrats are the ambulance chasing lawyers of the political world. If something bad happens, there will be a Democrat there trying to use it to their advantage. . .

But the United States has excellent care everywhere. While there is no “cure” for a virus, we have the ability to treat the symptoms more readily available than any other country in the world. And we also care to administer that care. Most of the rest of the world: not so much. . .

Dying from coronavirus is rare, the mortality rate is roughly 1-2 percent. Otherwise healthy people get sick with flu-like symptoms, then recover. The threat is to the elderly, particularly those with respiratory issues or other health problems.

You wouldn’t know any of this if you just listened to Democrats and their public relations arm in the media. To hear them tell it, we’re on the verge of a pandemic that will make the Walking Dead look like a Sunday picnic. . .

Instead, we get politicians hyperventilating, claiming the president hasn’t requested enough money to fight the disease. Not said is what the “extra” money Democrats insist is necessary is actually necessary for. Are there experts and labs out there that could find a treatment but they’re sitting idle because they don’t have any money? Are there more masks and antiseptics cluttering warehouses because the government doesn’t have the money to buy them? No. (Read more from “Corona Causes Stupidity to Go Viral” HERE)

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Why the Rare Court Win on Sanctuary Cities Is so Important — and How Trump Can Make the Most of It

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Does a state have the right to use its law enforcement to thwart immigration law and then demand federal grant funds for its law enforcement? It’s a question that never even should have been in court, given that courts don’t appropriate funds, but because every political issue winds up in court, the Trump administration has been stymied in enforcing immigration laws against the states. That is, until now.

In reversal of a district court ruling and in disagreement with other more liberal circuit court rulings, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday that the Department of Justice was justified in cutting off law enforcement grants to sanctuary cities, such as New York City. The Second Circuit covers the states of New York, Vermont, and Connecticut, but New Jersey, Washington, Massachusetts, Virginia, and Rhode Island joined in the original district court lawsuit in New York.

“Repeatedly and throughout its pronouncement of Byrne Program statutory requirements, Congress makes clear that a grant applicant demonstrates qualification by satisfying statutory requirements in such form and according to such rules as the Attorney General establishes,” wrote Judge Reena Raggi for the unanimous three-judge panel. “This confers considerable authority on the Attorney General.”

Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions promulgated a regulation in 2017 requiring states to comply with three conditions in order to be eligible for Byrne Grant funds. Pursuant to the policy, states cannot restrict communications with federal authorities about the citizenship and immigration status of its incarcerated aliens, they are prohibited from releasing criminal aliens without prior notice, if requested by ICE, and they must allow federal immigration authorities access to incarcerated aliens. These jurisdictions were slated to lose $385 million in justice assistance grants.

States and cities sued the policy and won victories in numerous district courts as well as in the Seventh and Ninth Circuits. The courts’ rationales centered on federalism and state sovereignty, as if to say there is somehow a right for states to get federal funding while violating the sovereignty of the whole of the union.

Judge Raggi rejected this argument by noting that the relevant statue allows the attorney general to make conditions on grant funding. Plus, withholding federal grants is not a form of commandeering states, because they are free to do what they want and not take the money. “A State is deprived of ‘legitimate choice’ only when the federal government imposes grant conditions that pass the point at which ‘pressure turns into compulsion,’” said the Second Circuit opinion.

Furthermore, Judge Raggi noted that 8 U.S.C. §1373 explicitly bars states from prohibiting communication with immigration authorities, a power that the federal government legitimately holds. Citing Arizona v. U.S., she made it clear that the Supreme Court has said the federal government has complete control over immigration, even when states want to get tougher on illegal aliens. Certainly, that applies when states want to undermine federal enforcement.

Thus, statute actually requires what the states say the Trump administration cannot do. And to say the statute itself is unconstitutional on 10th Amendment grounds is wrong as well because, as Raggi noted, the law doesn’t “affirmatively conscript states, localities, or their employees into the federal government’s service,” such as with the costly Medicaid expansion or aspects of the Americans with Disabilities Act. “Rather, the law prohibits state and local governments and officials ‘only from directly restricting the voluntary exchange of immigration information’ with federal immigration authorities.”

That’s the bottom line. All they are asking is for states not to obstruct a core federal power. The federal government is not mandating any costly regulatory structure – just don’t harbor illegal aliens. There is no practical way for the federal government to exercise its solemn responsibility if states are active accomplices to the assault on the national sovereignty.

Trump needs to take this victory a step further and find other programs to withhold from these states. His power is an even broader mandate than what the court acknowledged. 8 U.S.C. 1373 was enacted as part of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act precisely to ensure that illegal aliens don’t benefit from public assistance. By definition, any grant program would benefit illegal aliens were it to be funneled equally to jurisdictions filled with the majority of illegal aliens in this country.

States using undesirable aliens to increase their representation in the federal government is quite literally why the Constitution took the issue away from the states, where it was under the Articles of Confederation. Writing in Federalist #42, Madison elaborates that the federal power over naturalization solved “a very serious embarrassment” and “defect” of the Articles of Confederation whereby “certain descriptions of aliens, who had rendered themselves obnoxious” can force themselves on several states had they “acquired the character of citizens under the laws of another State.”

Thus, the federal conditions on the executive order are not extraneous to the policy goals of the underlying grant as they would be if, say, the federal government cut off transportation funding to a state for implementing an undesirable social policy related to gender-neutral bathrooms. In this case, the law is designed to target the recipients of benefits, not a social behavior or a political policy of the local government.

Therefore, the Trump administration would be justified in cutting off other grant funding programs as well so that sanctuary cities don’t reap the reward of their crime by accumulating more people illegally to gobble up federal funding.

It’s not very often that conservatives enjoy a broad victory in the courts. Trump should make the most of it. (For more from the author of “Why the Rare Court Win on Sanctuary Cities Is so Important — and How Trump Can Make the Most of It” please click HERE)

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