By Jason Smith Member of Congress
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Since his first day in office, Joe Biden insisted that his priority was crushing the coronavirus and restoring normalcy to America. He claimed President Trump failed – even going so far as to state at one point that “220,000 deaths. If you hear nothing else, I say tonight, hear this: Anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain President of the United States. Well, guess what? Under his watch, more Americans have died. Blue state politicians have continued to keep their states and cities locked down, and we continue to also be one of the only developed nations left in the world that mandates our children wear useless facemasks in school.
In his first few months in office Joe Biden rammed through a partisan spending package that he claimed was all about defeating COVID. He spent 2 trillion of your tax dollars while doing it. But as Republican Leader of the Budget Committee I exposed that less than 9 percent of that money actually went to fighting COVID. The rest? It went to things like planting trees in upstate New York, new apartment buildings in Connecticut, parking lots and bathrooms at beaches in South Carolina and even a new $17 million golf course in Florida. In other words, Joe Biden used your tax dollars as a political slush fund to bail out his friends, allies and political donors.
Unfortunately, the lies and deception didn’t stop there. We have since further uncovered that of that 9 percent meant to “combat COVID-19”, the President actually diverted billions away from things like testing, our national strategic stockpile, and other COVID measures to instead provide housing benefits to the almost 2 million illegal immigrants who have crossed our border since the start of his Presidency.
As if all of this hasn’t been painful enough, the White House actually had the audacity this week to ask Congress to hand over another $30 billion of taxpayer resources in the name of “COVID-19”. Enough already! The only impact all of this spending from Joe Biden has had is American’s are feeling crushed by the highest surge of inflation in 40 years. Congress shouldn’t approve one penny more for this kind of mismanagement.
The President is desperately hoping that throwing more money at the problem will help cover up the mess he has created. But the truth is this crisis is not due to a lack of funding. The problems we face today are all due to a lack of leadership in the White House.
Biden wants to use a permanent pandemic narrative to usher in the biggest expansion of federal power and Washington bureaucrat control in generations. He wants us to believe that fear of this virus should be so great that we should turn over our rights, and trust the decisions his White House makes for us. Command and control from Washington – that’s the liberal dream. But that dream is a nightmare for real Americans, and I will never stop fighting against this state-sponsored, top-down approach. To quote Charlton Heston, they’ll have to take these rights “from my cold, dead hands.”
Missourians aren’t waiting for permission to move on with their lives. We’ve been back to work, back to school, back to our regular activities, and we’ve learned to live with COVID as a normal, manageable risk in our daily lives – just as we’ve learned to live with lots of other diseases or perils of life that befall us. We’ve all been touched in some way by COVID – many of us have lost family, friends or loved ones, but none of us want to go back to the days of guidance based on nothing more than Anthony Fauci’s opinion of right and wrong.
It’s time for Joe Biden to stop feeding the panic. America needs to move forward confidently, and we can’t do that unless he gets out of the way.