Joe Biden’s long-delayed press conference included obsessive references to Donald Trump, at one point bizarrely exclaiming “Oh God, I miss him.” Our border agents surely miss Trump, as they are overrun by illegal aliens attracted by Biden’s invitation to unlawful immigration from Central America.
Yet Biden refuses to visit our patrol agents despite the humanitarian crisis that is attracting worldwide attention. Trump, showing his tremendous character, declared that he plans to visit the border and thereby illustrate the lack of leadership in the White House today.
Biden announced that he had assigned his Vice President Kamala Harris to handle the border crisis. Then Harris refused to go down there, perhaps realizing what a disaster such a visit would be to her own political future.
“The vice president is not doing the border,” Harris’s spokeswoman Symone Sanders declared to reporters two days after she was handed that assignment. Politicians avoid photo ops with problems their own policies caused.
Humanitarian crises at the border are rarely reported by the mainstream media bent on rehashing the sad death of George Floyd, but some news is so tragic it cannot be censored. A nine-year-old girl died drowning while crossing the Rio Grande last week, while thousands of others have been sexually abused during the 2,000-mile trip from Central America.
Biden said his goal is to stop the stream of illegal migrants to the United States. But his actions spoke louder, thereby ensuring that millions more will try to cross our border, because Biden indicated that he is not going to block their entry.
To the extent that Central American children do not die during passage, they will become dependent on our stretched government programs for support. Children who enter illegally are eventually placed in public schools which cannot cope with the influx.
Biden did not misspeak during the press conference, because we could tell that he depended on written notes which he read from the podium, along with pictures of the reporters he would invite to ask questions. No modern president has had to rely on notes to make it through a press conference, and the questions were pathetically tame.
Only after the press conference was over did we learn that the Biden Administration secretly plans to impose standards for a “vaccine passport” to regulate public access to restaurants, airplanes, sports arenas, schools, theaters, and anywhere groups of people traditionally gather. Those lacking such a passport could be excluded.
This would be a shocking infringement on the ordinary liberty that Americans take for granted. Passports should only be for entry into a country, not to restrict movement within our United States.
Five officials within the Biden Administration have confirmed the vaccine passport scheme, using smartphones to implement it. Access to our favorite restaurant or airport could be blocked based on failure to show a personal bar code to confirm vaccination.
Less than half of Americans have been vaccinated against COVID-19, so this would cause some businesses to go bankrupt. But Biden’s staff is investigating how to ensure that the passport will be so widely used that there will be no way around it.
This type of passport would not, of course, be limited to the COVID-19 vaccine. Soon it would include other health and personal information about each of us, including what we have said and where we have been.
It could include, for example, information about whether someone was in Washington, D.C., on January 6th for the Trump rally, or any political rally disfavored by the liberal media. It could include whether someone has been vaccinated against diseases other than COVID-19.
The passport might be required by employers, such that it could become impossible to obtain or maintain a job without it. Sports leagues for youngsters could be limited to those who comply with passport requirements.
The State of New York, as led by the discredited Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo, has developed the Excelsior Pass as a smartphone app for demonstrating that someone has been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. The European Union is pushing a similar concept under the name “Digital Green Certificate.”
Biden simultaneously calls on states to impose mask mandates, which several Republican governors have dropped. Far from vaccination helping restore liberty, it appears to be undermining it.
Herd immunity against COVID is not attainable by voluntary vaccination in the United States. Biden’s call to vaccinate 200 million Americans in 100 days is not enough to achieve herd immunity, and the vaccine passport scheme is a way to compel vaccination by those who would prefer not to receive it.
Meanwhile, there remains no passport requirement for anyone crossing our southern border with Mexico, as many tens of thousands stream in weekly. Law-abiding Americans are losing their freedoms under Biden, while law-breaking immigrants are pouring in.
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.
