Almost every decision that has been made in Washington and in the states that deals with COVID-19 has been about politics and money, hundreds of billions of dollars, and not about public health.
COVID-19 is a deadly virus that has killed over a million Americans — almost all over the age of 65. But from day one, the overreaction and misinformation from politicians and the public health industrial complex was a campaign to embarrass and discredit then-President Donald Trump. It became an excuse to get Trump out of office.
For the record, I was in the Oval Office many times with Trump, and he always wanted to get the economy reopened as quickly as possible. But Democrats and the public health industrial complex, with the help of supposed experts such as Anthony Fauci, the now-retired director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at the time wanted lockdowns as long as possible. And they wanted to spend trillions of dollars to redistribute income.
We now know, of course, that lockdowns had a minimal impact as a public health measure. But they capsized the best economy (in an election year) in 40 years. Just in time to get President Joe Biden elected.
How convenient.
Here we are, three years into COVID-19, and politics is still the driving force in government policy. It became an excuse for Biden to spend trillions of dollars — paid for with debt. COVID-19 has been over for at least a year and a half. (The recent strains are no more deadly than the flu.) And yet we still have Biden’s “emergency” COVID-19 powers.
The Senate voted three times last year on immediately terminating the COVID-19 emergency. And it passed all three times, with growing Democratic support on each attempt, reaching 62 votes in November.
Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) never once even allowed a House vote.
Now the Republicans control the House, Biden says he will end the emergency. But not until May! Three months from now.
This is dangerous and, to borrow a term from Biden, a “threat to democracy” to have the president act as a dictator. Emergency powers allow the president to suspend the normal constitutional process and make laws by decree.
Why the never-ending crisis? It’s all about the money. Biden doesn’t want to end the emergency that he himself stated was over many months ago because it allows him to continue dishing out billions of dollars of health and welfare benefits to his voters — automatically and unilaterally.
Don’t forget that Biden even used the COVID-19 crisis to “forgive” hundreds of billions of dollars of student loan debt. What do student loans have to do with COVID-19?
Now, Biden says that COVID-19 will end when the Supreme Court declares the emergency over. The Supreme Court should take these dictatorial powers away from Biden tomorrow. This isn’t about public health. As always, it’s about the money.
Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economist with FreedomWorks. His latest book is “Govzilla: How the Relentless Growth of Government is Devouring our Economy.”
