[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 204 (Thursday, December 3, 2020)]
[House]
[Pages H6051-H6052]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        CURFEWS AND COMMON SENSE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. McClintock) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, Governor Newsom made a groundbreaking 
discovery regarding COVID-19 last week. Apparently, it has learned to 
tell time. Thus, acting under the strictest of scientific standards, he 
has ordered Californians to run home before 10 p.m., lock their doors, 
and hide from this insidious virus until daybreak.
  Unfortunately, COVID doesn't seem to be following the curfew, so 
Newsom is now threatening yet another hard lockdown of virtually the 
entire State throughout the Christmas season. Don we now our plague 
apparel.
  There is just one nagging question the Governor hasn't bothered to 
answer. If these lockdowns are so successful, why do we need to keep 
having them?
  Now, we are told not to worry. We are cheerfully assured that the 
jobs that are being destroyed are nonessential. That is their term, 
nonessential.
  Well, I have news for these self-absorbed elitists. If a job is 
putting food on your table and a roof over your head that job is 
essential for you and the family that depends upon you.
  Last spring, I asked Anthony Fauci if he had taken into account the 
human cost of these lockdowns, the suicides, the drug and alcohol 
abuse, the domestic violence, the deferred health screenings and 
treatments, and the poverty related deaths that his policies were 
setting into motion. No, we really haven't considered that, he breezily 
replied.
  Don't know, don't care.
  But before Fauci and his followers took a wrecking ball to our 
Nation, poverty had dropped to its lowest rate since 1959. Unemployment 
was the lowest in 50 years. The income gap was narrowing. Wages showed 
their strongest growth in 40 years.
  How many millions of these jobs have now been wantonly destroyed by 
autocratic officials who seem oblivious to the damage that they are 
causing?
  Now, according to the CDC's best estimate, those under 50 have a 
99.98 percent chance of recovering from COVID, if they get it at all; 
99.98 percent. And 40 percent who get it don't even know they have it.
  Even for the most vulnerable group, over 70, the survival rate is 
94.6 percent.
  Now, Sweden did not force its businesses to close. Sweden didn't shut 
down its schools and abandon its children to the streets. Sweden didn't 
even adopt a mask mandate.
  Sweden did what free societies do; they gave the best advice they 
could, and they trusted their citizens to use their own good judgment 
of what measures made sense to them.
  The result? Well, as of this morning, Sweden's mortality rate from 
COVID is 154 deaths per million below that of the United States. If we 
had Sweden's rate, that would mean over 50,000 fewer American deaths 
from COVID.
  Meanwhile, Sweden has sustained a fraction of the economic damage 
that our lockdown leftists have inflicted on innocent Americans. 
Globally, the United Nations warns that 130 million people will starve 
to death around the world because of the economic damage caused by 
these measures.
  Mr. Speaker, this has to stop. The good news is that more and more 
Americans are questioning the lunacy of these policies and the 
hypocrisy of those who impose them. Newsom's curfew order was met with 
spontaneous defiant demonstrations across the State. Elected sheriffs 
are increasingly refusing to enforce these autocratic orders. Pastors 
are reopening their churches. Businesses are reopening, even as their 
owners are taken away in handcuffs.
  All mass hysterias are driven by blind fear, fanned by politicians 
and

[[Page H6052]]

charlatans who see opportunity in them. And we have, sadly, learned 
that such fear can cause a free people to abandon their legacy of 
freedom and independence, their prosperity, and their common sense, but 
only for a while.
  Every time in history that this has happened, there is always a 
moment when the fear fever breaks, and the hysteria suddenly burns 
itself out. The French Revolution, the Salem witch trials, the 
Communist hysteria of the 1950s all had a moment when the absurdity of 
it all became so apparent that it overcame the fear and the people 
turned on their tormentors.
  Now, I don't know if the recent wave of business and religious 
persecutions, the unlimited home detention orders, and the demonstrated 
hypocrisy of those who have ordered them signals that moment. But every 
shopkeeper who defies these petty tyrants, every parent who confronts 
their school officials, every person who refuses to submit to the 
dysfunctional dystopian world created by the lockdown left brings us 
one step closer to that turning point. It can't come soon enough.

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