TO LIVE OR NOT TO LIVE: THAT'S THE QUESTION

TO LIVE OR NOT TO LIVE: THAT’S THE QUESTION

The United States Department of Agriculture runs the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS).  This agency established by Congress uses the power of the federal government to regulate foreign commerce to prevent people bringing into this country, even travelers on airlines who are not doing it for profit, any plant material or animal that is infected with any contagious bacteria or virus that might infect U.S. plants or animals, including humans.  When aliens come here under legal procedures they, like plants and animals, are subject to having their health situation examining for the possibility that they may be carrying something that could harm Americans.

It is a striking and dangerous development that has been pointed out by Representative Michael Burgess (R. TX), who is a medical doctor as well as a Congressman, that because illegal immigrants clearly are not subjected to any comparable inspection and watch as is exercised for APHIS for plants and animals that might carry harmful diseases and similarly for legal visitors and immigrants, they can bring deadly diseases in to spread among us and we have no effective way to even know if it is happening, much less prevent it. 

As a direct result of the policies of our federal executive branch, which were formerly policies reflecting neglect and failure to enforce and carry out measures dictated by Congress, but which now, under the present regime, have passed into policies of willful malfeasance, while we actively work at the federal level to prevent plants and animals from bringing in deadly diseases, we open the door wide to people who could be doing the same.  The regime is quite determined to run any risk of harm to Americans to reap what it sees as votes on a massive scale for its political party, and as Representative Burgess correctly points out, dangerous and even fatal contagious diseases that affect humans, such as tuberculosis, are resurfacing in America.  The danger is all the greater in that illegals are bringing in these diseases in strains that are resistant to the treatments including vaccines that were used to bring them under control in the U.S. when they formerly ravaged huge numbers of people many years ago.   To this we must add new diseases that have spring up in other quarters of the world in recent times. 

For example, the Middle East is threatened with a new plague, one eponymously if not ominously named the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS-CoV, or MERS for short). This novel coronavirus was discovered in Jordan in March 2012, and as of June 26, 2013 there have been 77 laboratory-confirmed infections, 62 of which have been in Saudi Arabia; 34 of these Saudi patients have died.  Although the numbers -- so far -- are small, the disease is raising anxiety throughout the region. But officials in Saudi Arabia are particularly concerned.

This fall, millions of devout Muslims will descend upon Mecca, Medina, and Saudi Arabia's holy sites in one of the largest annual migrations in human history. In 2012, approximately 6 million pilgrims came through Saudi Arabia to perform the rituals associated with umrah, and this number is predicted to rise in 2013. Umrah literally means "to visit a populated place," and it's the very proximity that has health officials so worried. In Mecca alone, millions of pilgrims will fulfill the religious obligation of circling the Kaaba. And having a large group of people together in a single, fairly confined space threatens to turn the holiest site in Islam into a massive petri dish.

Meanwhile, back here in the States, on any given night you can go to the emergency room of your local hospital and in almost every part of the country, with a few exceptions in its far north you can hear Spanish as the predominant language.   This is now true not just in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas and the old Southwest of the reconquesta maps on the wall at La Raza.  You can go, for example, to the hospital emergency rooms of the wealthy suburban counties of Washington, D.C. and in Chicago and it is the case.  By law the hospitals are required to treat all who come to the ER, whether they have insurance or not.  This is the actual free healthcare that was serving millions who did not have insurance before the country was sold the big lie of “free” Obamacare, which is already driving up costs and decreasing the quality of care in far cry from the economic benefits that its namesake misled us about.  And now there have been credible reports of middle easterners slipping over the southern border passing themselves off as Hispanic illegals so as to blend in and not be singled out and stopped.

If we put this together with the fact being brought out by Representative Burgess we have the potential for recurrences of diseases we thought a short while ago had been long since conquered and eradicated and of new fatal diseases such as the MERS virus as well.  We have the potential to see again something like the great flu epidemic of 1918.  The days of the necessity of quarantine will be upon us it we are to prevent this from happening.  We can expect the alarm to arise and be sounded at the grass roots level, at the tea party level.  Leaders like Prince William County, Virginia’s Corey Stewart will urge decisive action and the grass roots will respond.  We can expect such leadership particularly in the border states where the danger, for obvious reasons, is the greatest.

The danger is highlighted at present by the explosive growth of fatalities from the CRE virus, immune so far to known antibiotics.  We do not know if this deadly family is growing elsewhere in the world and being brought in by illegals. There is an organization that tracks the growth of deadly bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics all over the world.   State officials could track these developments and identify the dangers and the countries from which they come.  Where did they come from?  A good part of our field of vision for finding out is blocked by the great influx of illegal aliens.

In former years, when the constitutional rule of law still prevailed, it was clear that “police power” was reserved to the states and their localities.  There was no question that they were empowered to abridge considerations of penumbra privacy to prevent their citizens from dying by taking measures necessary to know if those showing up in their hospitals that were diagnosed as carriers of any such threats were legitimately here.  Further their imperative would have been to assure accurate diagnoses to see if those who could reasonably be “profiled” as possibly carrying deadly diseases could be consistently and accurately diagnosed.  There is no reason from an originalist position to not use this police power through states and localities.  Visitors to Emergency Rooms, can be compelled by state and local authorities to reveal how they got here if they came from another land and when and from just where they came. .

Don’t put bets on this present occupant of the Oval Office allowing such reasonable measures to be taken.  They would be in direct conflict to his clear mission to destroy such local police power in the name of increasing the input of voters for his party as the midterm election approach.  His drive for centralized command and control to “transform” the county into one in which he is the ruler will outweigh his concern for our lives.  He will risk our death to get his way.  Perhaps we will at least witness the end of the utterly untrue recitation that he is a “nice guy.”   Chances are that we will be staring into a darkness that advances no one except those that are willing to violate the constitutional rule of law for votes and don’t care if in order to slake their thirst for centralized command power many will die.  But at the state level states still have the power to take away privacy to prevent death from those who might claim such protection.  Let the good leaders rising among them assert it.  This power would include the power to quarantine to save their citizens from death.