Texas Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw took to the House Floor and proposed a bill to end the coronavirus lockdowns nationwide and prevent the president of the United States from imposing a national lockdown or placing bans on interstate travel. He posited that the “rest of the country should follow Texas” and refers to a study that shows cases and hospitalizations on a sharp downtrend.
The study Rep. Crenshaw cites comes from Stanford University that “compared cases in England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and the U.S. – all countries that implemented mandatory lockdown orders and business closures – to South Korea and Sweden, which instituted less severe, voluntary responses.”
The study, published in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation, claims there were no clear, significant beneficial effects of more restrictive measures on case growth in any country. It cautions that “cross-country comparisons are difficult” and that they do not question the role of all public health interventions, but that they fail to find an additional benefit of stay-at-home orders and business closures.
“Unscientific, unconstitutional economic lockdowns have destroyed millions of lives and countless small businesses. They have zero benefit to public health, but massive costs to local economies and livelihoods. That’s why we need to end lockdowns for good,” Rep. Crenshaw said.
Crenshaw’s Bill, the End Lockdowns Now Act, would require state and local governments to establish plans for reopening their economies as a condition for receiving federal coronavirus relief funds. It must include details on how schools would reopen, how restrictions on business activity will be lifted, how religious services and public social gatherings will be permitted, and how families receive economic assistance for recovery.
“My bill also clarifies federal law to deny the President authority to issue a nationwide lockdown or impose blanket bans on interstate travel. The American people have suffered long enough under authoritarian lockdowns. We must end them now and work to ensure they never happen again. That’s exactly what my bill does,” Rep. Crenshaw adds.
This comes after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced earlier in the week that he would be ending the state’s mask mandate and lifting all coronavirus restrictions. His new executive order would rescind most of the earlier executive orders and would be effective next Wednesday, allowing businesses of any type to open 100%. He announced that this doesn’t abandon the safe practices, but rather that each person has a role to play in their own personal safety rather than by government mandate.
“Individual responsibility is a corollary to individual freedom, we can have both,” Gov. Abbott adds.
Rep. Crenshaw also fired back at the hypocrisy of these so-called ‘leaders’ who have been deliberately harming the citizens they claim to represent and condemned the deeply partisan actions of Speaker Pelosi, who admitted to stalling relief for the American people until after the recent presidential election.
“She would say over and over again that nothing is better than something. She was being honest; she honestly believed that nothing was better than something. But better for who? Not for the American people, that’s for sure. She believed that nothing was better than something — for her and her party. It’s hard to imagine a more awful and heartless strategy,” Rep. Crenshaw said.
The End Lockdowns Now Act already exists and it’s called the Constitution, but the Democrats would never read that.
