Biden Plays Politics on Covid

Joe Biden never misses an opportunity to politicize any issue, including the relatively benign Delta Indian variant of Covid. Today, Biden tried to blame Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis–coincidentally, both Republicans–for the Indian variant’s inevitable spread:

US President Joe Biden on Tuesday urged Republican leaders in Florida and Texas – home to roughly a third of all new U.S. COVID-19 cases – to follow public health guidelines on the pandemic or “get out of the way” as the country struggles to contain the rapid spread of the disease’s Delta variant.
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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has opposed strict COVID-19 restrictions. On Friday, he issued an order blocking mask mandates in the state’s schools. Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued an order last spring that would impose fines for mask mandates.

“Some governors aren’t willing to do the right thing to beat this pandemic, and they should allow businesses and universities who want to do the right thing to be able to do it,” Biden said, without referencing the two men by name.

Of course there is no evidence that mask mandates do anything to prevent any covid variant from spreading. Rather than criticizing Abbott and DeSantis, Biden should try to learn from them. Both Texas and Florida have been more successful than neighboring states with regard to covid. Here is the map, per the CDC, of fatalities per 100,000 population. Click to enlarge:

Texas, at 179 deaths per 100,000 population, has a lower covid death rate than any adjoining state. Likewise, Florida, at 181 deaths per 100,000, has the lowest rate not only of any adjoining state, but of any state in the Southeast. Rather than trying to score political points off these very successful red states, whose economies are booming even as they leave most blue states in the dust with regard to covid, Biden should look to them for lessons in best practices.

But that raises the question: are there states that have done unusually badly with regard to covid fatalities? Yes, indeed there are. They are mostly in the liberal northeast, but one southwestern state stands out. Arizona has suffered 250 covid deaths per 100,000, more than three times the rate in Utah, more than two times the rate in Colorado, and far more than the rate in Greg Abbott’s Texas.

Why might that be? The obvious answer is that under Joe Biden’s anti-American immigration policies, hundreds of thousands if not millions of Central Americans, Mexicans and others who have not been vaccinated and in many cases are infected with covid are streaming across the Arizona border. Joe Biden has deliberately allowed covid to spread to many thousands of Arizonans and other Americans, in blatant violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws of the United States be faithfully executed.

It is tempting to say that Biden is so slow and so senile that there is no point in trying to hold him accountable for anything. But he is the President of the United States, and we should hold him to the same standard that would apply to a normally functioning politician. If Republicans take control of the House of Representatives in 2022, as looks likely, they should impeach Biden for his blatant violation of the take care clause of Article II.

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