Senate Republicans Blocked The Next Round Of Covid Relief As Part Of Their Anti-Immigrant ‘White Fright’ 2022 Election Strategy

Multiple senators confirmed earlier this month that they delayed voting on a bill to pour $10 billion more into pandemic programs until after the two-week Easter recess, a decision top administration health officials have said further threatens the country’s ability to fight the virus and prepare for potential surges and variants.

Politico reports, Senate punts $10 billion in Covid aid until after Easter amid stalemate over border policy:

The move came days after Senate Republicans stopped the legislation from advancing because they weren’t guaranteed an amendment vote on reinstating Title 42, the Trump-era policy that allows for the expulsion of migrants at the border during the pandemic.

But, but, but … the pandemic is over according to MAGA/QAnon Covid deniers. So this is just classic American white supremacy racism against immigrants. The U.S. has an ugly history of blaming ‘foreigners’ for disease (excerpt):

The United States has a history of assigning blame for disease spread tounwanted immigrant populations, often as justifications for anti-immigration policies — in particular, targeting people of Chinese and East Asian ancestry. The United States relied on Chinese labor as it expanded the continental empire westward and laid claim to the Hawaiian Kingdom. But most people in the United States did not want Chinese people to settle here permanently. In the late 1800s, as concerns about Chinese migration and labor competition rose, public health officials and politicians associated Chinese laborers and migrants with sickness, depravity and filth.

These officials blamed Chinese people for bringing smallpox, syphilis, trachoma and the bubonic plague. Racialized ideas about disease were part of the reasoning used to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Congressional and public support for Chinese exclusion hinged on the notion that Chinese migrants could not adapt to civilized, respectable Western lifestyles and therefore were not worthy of inclusion in the U.S. nation or civil society. Their imagined diseases were seen as a result of their uncivilized habits.

What’s more, the association between disease and people of East Asian descent was used to justify quarantining and burning Chinatowns in San Francisco and Honolulu. As officials in San Francisco and Honolulu set up bubonic plague quarantines and other forms of control beginning in 1898 and through 1904, they blamed Chinese people for the unhygienic conditions.

At the same time, this common-sense association gave officials justification for limiting the legal and political rights of Chinese and other East Asian people. Rather than blame U.S. policies like segregation, poor tenement housing conditions, and overseas labor recruitment, U.S. officials instead assigned blame for the spread of disease to unwanted immigrant populations.

OMG! Clutch your pearls, MAGA/QAnon white supremacists. I just gave you a quickie Critical Race Theory on American history.  As your idiot-hero Sarah Palin would say, “no more of your vanilla milquetoast namby-pamby wussy pussy stuff.” (A Palin projection self-own.)

Politico continues:

“The Republicans are playing politics with the health of the American people,” charged Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). “Blocking Covid protection money is a ticking time bomb for public health. So Democrats will come back and try to get the money we need, but this is not a good day for the health of the world.”

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who spent the last several weeks negotiating the Covid deal on behalf of Republicans, shot back that Republicans are ready to approve the bill once Democrats grant them amendment votes.

“As soon as we have an amendment process, we can get onto the bill and proceed,” he said. “Once we have that, I think we’ll have well more than 60 votes. But until then, we obviously can’t move forward.”

So far, Democratic leaders have refused, calling Title 42 “extraneous” and a “distraction.”

“We had an agreement on getting this package done, not on doing a bunch of sidebar issues,” Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the Senate’s top health care appropriator, told reporters. “We need therapeutics, we need tests for a new variant, we need to get this done.”

Spare me the procedural bullshit, Mittens. You are just as racist as the rest of the Senate Republicans if you are going along with this Title 42 amendment.

What Mittens is referring to with his “60 votes” comment is his “bipartisan” friends on the Democratic side of the aisle, the moderate corporate Democrats who are either craven coward appeasers, or enthusiastic enablers of GQP obstructionism. Democrats in tough races revolt over Biden administration border move:

President Biden is facing a growing mutiny from Democratic candidates — including five vulnerable senators — who are questioning his administration’s decision to lift a pandemic health order that has drastically curtailed migrants’ ability to seek asylum at the southern border.

The internal dissension is an early acknowledgment from many Democrats that worries about border security and immigration could become a major obstacle for them in this year’s midterm elections [i.e., the GQP’s anti-immigrant hysteria “white fright” 2022 election strategy.]

Craven cowards! Call out these white supremacists for who they are and condemn them for their racist, divisive election strategy. Stand up and defend all Americans, regardless of race, national origin, creed or color against the GQP’s malignant cancer of white supremacy.

You are going to cower in the face of Fox News’ fascist propaganda for white supremacy? You’re telling me you don’t have the moral fortitude and courage to stand up for what is morally right and just? Then your sorry ass doesn’t deserve to be elected. You disgust me. The only thing worse than the enemies of democracy are those craven cowards who are their appeasers.

In other cases, like our Vichy Democrat Sen. Kysten Sinema, she is an enthusiastic enabler of Republican obstructionism. (Mark Kelly is being a damned fool for aligning himself with his seat mate). Sinema, Kelly want border plan ready before Title 42 ends (March 2022):

Democratic Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly of Arizona urged President Joe Biden against lifting a public health directive used to close the border to asylum-seekers until the administration has a plan in place to process migrants’ claims.

Their position, outlined in a Thursday evening letter, puts them at odds with their fellow Democrats, who have recently ramped up calls for the administration to rescind the border directive known as Title 42.

Implemented by the Trump administration in March 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Title 42 allows border agents to rapidly “expel” migrants who cross the border without first considering their claims for asylum and other protection.

The Biden administration has kept the policy in place; border agents have expelled migrants more than 1.7 million times since the directive was implemented, including more than a million times last year alone. The directive is next up for review on March 30.

Title 42 “should not be in effect indefinitely,” Kelly and Sinema said in their letter, noting the dangerous conditions to which the policy subjects expelled migrants. But at the same time, chaos at the border “also negatively affects migrants’ safety and could further strain an already overwhelmed health care system at the border,” they wrote.

An abrupt policy change without a comprehensive plan ready to replace it “would significantly increase the strain on DHS, border communities, and local nonprofits that are already near or at capacity,” they said.

This is bullshit! The only thing these two are actually concernned about are the right-wing PAC ads and Republican politicians deploying their anti-immigrant hysteria “white fright” 2022 election strategy against them. They don’t really care about immigrants seeking asylum on the border (have they ever met with them?), or the strain on the health care system on the border – they are only concerned about higher numbers of immigrants crossing the border and how Republicans will use this in their white supremacy replacement theory “white fright” 2022 election strategy.

Politico continues:

Democrats had grudgingly settled for a far smaller Covid aid package than they wanted and that federal officials and public health advocates say is needed. The $10 billion, which includes no money for the global vaccination campaign or Covid services for the uninsured, is less than half of what the White House asked Congress to provide, and is only expected to last a few months before Covid programs would need an additional infusion of cash.

But the issue of Title 42 has divided the caucus. A growing chorus of swing-state Democrats — many of them up for reelection this November — have joined Republicans to demand that President Joe Biden keep the policy, at least until there’s a plan to deal with the expected surge of migrants seeking asylum at the border.

Democrats are also divided over cuts in the bill to other federal spending to satisfy Republicans who demand that any new money be fully offset.

Craven coward appeasers!

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), for example, joined Republicans earlier this week in blocking the legislation to protest the decision to claw back money from rural aid and small business programs his state depends on. [Legit protest.]

Asked whether delaying the bill until at least late April is a problem, considering key pandemic programs were recently halted due to lack of funds, Romney said of the GOP: “From our standpoint, no.”

“You’d hate to have it delayed by two weeks but that wouldn’t be the end of the world,” he added.

Some of Romney’s GOP colleagues, who recently voted to declare the pandemic over, say they’re not convinced the money is needed and argue the ongoing Covid spending is doing more harm than good.

Like I said, “But, but, but … the pandemic is over according to MAGA/QAnon Covid deniers.” So why would Title 42, a public health regulation, need to be continued? It’s all about the GQP’s anti-immigrant hysteria “white fright” 2022 election strategy.

[Some] Republicans acknowledged they are worried about the implications of punting the bill for two more weeks — and fear it might never get through.

“The biggest issue will likely be on therapeutics,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), Republicans’ top health care appropriator, told reporters. “[The federal government] already reduced their therapeutics allocation to states by 35 percent in late March because that account was totally or about to be out of money. And now we could just get further and further back in the orders [of the drugs] to be honored.”

Even if senators get the votes to pass the $10 billion right after the Easter recess, it still must clear the narrowly divided House, where some Democrats have vowed to vote no in protest of the bill’s exclusion of money for the global vaccination campaign. [The Senate’s version of the bill is a shortsighted “America First” bill.]

Yet Appropriations Chair Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and other leaders say they’re confident the House will be able to pass the Senate’s [watered-down] version of the package, arguing that most Democrats know it’s not currently possible to pass a bigger bill.

“Look, as you know, we’re desperate for money for Covid,” she told reporters. “On the domestic side of it, we started with a much higher number. And I’m very, very disappointed that there’s no money for the international fight. The virus doesn’t know any boundaries. But in the end, you’ve got to have the votes. If you don’t have the votes, you can’t win.”

More Covid-denier GQP sabotage of Covid relief efforts. America cannot isolate itself from the rest of the world. Covid-19 must be contained by vaccinations and therapeutic drugs on a global scale. A new variant which emerges anywhere in the world will find its way to the U.S. soon enough. It could have been prevented with preventive medicine. Damn stupid fools.