Republicans have really sunk their teeth into Ebola, banking on panic taking them to victory in November. They’ve also coalesced on a travel ban as their demand.
The number of lawmakers supporting travel restrictions surged Thursday to more than 70, according to a tally by The Hill. The majority of supporters are Republicans, with a just a handful of Democrats backing the idea. […]
Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), the vice chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said Congress should vote on a travel ban if Obama doesn’t put one in place by the time lawmakers reconvene in mid-November.
During a House Energy and Commerce Oversight subcommittee hearing Thursday with Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Director Thomas Frieden, Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) also urged a vote on legislation. […]
“People are asking that we do that, and they are exactly correct to make that request,” Burgess said.
But none of them beat Rep. Dennis Ross (R-FL) who plans on introducing legislation, but who didn’t know that there are not any direct flights from West Africa to the U.S. He’s not deterred by that inconvenient fact, though. “‘Then we don’t have any problem. Everybody’s contained, correct?’ Ross responded sarcastically. ‘They are not. They are traveling. They are traveling.’” Be afraid. Be very afraid. That’s Ross’s real message.
Not all Republicans, though, are rallying behind travel bans. Just the elected ones. For example, Mike Leavitt who was President George W. Bush’s Health and Human Services Secretary. Leavitt says—like just about every public health expert—that a travel ban would be counter-productive, and has “lots of problems.” Just two of those problems: “But would the U.S. expand the ban to European countries if people there got exposed? And what to do about Americans who want to come home?”
There are lots of reasons it’s a bad idea: it could make the West Africa crisis worse because it “would hamper the flow of medical supplies and aid workers into the afflicted region,” meaning the epidemic would worsen; it would make it harder to track infected people and “would make people less likely to seek treatment or be honest about any contacts they have had with Ebola patients,” and more likely to travel from one of the African countries not in the ban; it’s logistically very difficult to implement, since there are so many possible routes for people to use to come to the U.S. and no policymaker has come up with a good idea for how to do it; and previous experience in other countries shows it to be really expensive and not effective. The CDC’s Director, Tom Frieden, pointed out that “travel bans in other countries during the SARS outbreak a decade ago proved ‘unnecessary and ineffective,’ pointing to an estimated $40 billion in lost economic activity due to the travel restrictions.” That’s $40 billon lost and who knows how much spent in enforcement—which Republicans in the U.S. certainly aren’t talking about funding.
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Common sense never stopped Republicans before, however, and it’s not likely to now. They’re going to milk this “crisis” for all it’s worth until November 4. After that, all bets are off.
