Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has unveiled legislation that would divert funding from impeached president Donald Trump’s useless, expensive, and racist border fencing to combat the coronavirus outbreak, an actual public health emergency that Trump loyalists in the administration are wholly unprepared to take on.
"The coronavirus outbreak poses serious health, diplomatic, and economic threats to the United States, and we must be prepared to confront it head-on," Warren said in a statement. “Rather than use taxpayer dollars to pay for a monument to hate and division, my bill will help ensure that the federal government has the resources it needs to adequately respond to this emergency."
Campaign Action
“In the midst of this potential pandemic, President Trump has failed to direct significant financial resources to his coronavirus response,” the statement said, requesting “a mere $1.25 billion in emergency supplemental appropriations to combat the virus—an amount that received bipartisan opposition—and his administration is reportedly transferring $37 million to coronavirus efforts from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which funds heating for poor families.”
Meanwhile, the administration has moved to pillage billions more from military cash to fund another 177 miles of the impeached president’s wind-challenged border fencing, waiving laws left and right in order to finish it by Election Day. Some emergency, right? The true crisis here, as Daily Kos’ Kerry Eleveld wrote on Thursday, is Trump loyalists endangering Americans lives by prioritizing politics over public health and safety when experts say we should be preparing for a potential pandemic.
“Currently, more than 81,000 people have contracted the coronavirus, which is highly communicable and has killed approximately 3,000 people,” Warren’s office said, noting that “officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently announced that Americans should ‘prepare in the expectation that [a U.S. coronavirus outbreak] will be bad’ and stated that ‘it's not so much a question of if this will happen...but rather...a question of...when.’”
That, not vulnerable families languishing at the U.S.’ southern border as they wait for their chance to ask for asylum, is the true emergency endangering Americans, and it’s clear that, while public health experts are seriously concerned about protecting lives, Trump loyalists are not. As Eleveld also noted, look no further than the appointment of Mike Pence, who “pretty much singlehandedly botched the response to an HIV outbreak in Indiana while he was serving as governor,” to lead the U.S. response to coronavirus.
“Coronavirus poses a serious health, diplomatic, and economic threat, and we must be prepared to confront it head-on,” Warren tweeted. “So I’m introducing a bill to transfer all funding for Donald Trump’s racist border wall to HHS and USAID to combat coronavirus.”