Crosstalk: March 27, 2020

Mat Staver is a constitutional attorney, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel.

Last evening, the U.S. Senate passed the 2.2 trillion dollar coronavirus stimulus package.  It began as a one trillion dollar bill. This amount is staggering.

To put this in perspective, according to Mat, if the U.S. Treasury printed money at the rate of a dollar per second non-stop, it would take 63,420 years to print 2 trillion.  That equates to 634 lifetimes of 100 years each.

The battle that got things to this point began with Nancy Pelosi.  She scrapped the Senate bill and created her own. Contained in the bill were her own ‘pet projects’ including permanent funding of Planned Parenthood, elements of the ‘Green New Deal,’ carbon emissions, an LGBT agenda, funding PBS and more.

Through a lot of work, the Senate rejected all of this and passed their own bill.    

Now the legislation moves over to Nancy Pelosi and the House.  She’s not likely to be happy to see that her ‘pet projects’ were rejected.  That vote is expected tomorrow.

Some senators found a very problematic provision in the Senate version.  It gives to those who collect unemployment $600 over and above what they would otherwise be entitled to.  So in most cases, people could obtain unemployment benefits for up to 39 weeks at a higher rate than what they were making on the job itself.  This is basically incentivizing layoffs and could make the ‘unemployment line’ situation worse, not better.

Sadly, so much of the negotiating seems to surround how the ‘left’ can advance their socialist agenda.  For example, Mat noted how Joe Biden is insisting, along with Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that the ‘Green New Deal’ be part of this bill.  In fact, House Democrat James Clyburn, admitted a few days ago that this is a tremendous opportunity for the Democrats to implement their vision of the future.

There’s a third coronavirus bill yet to come so this is far from over.     

Closer to home, governors and mayors have been issuing broad executive orders that are not well vetted.  Businesses have been told to close on short notice. People have been ordered to stay home. Fines have been imposed on some violators.  In the case of some California jurisdictions, the tracking of people with night-vision drones for compliance purposes is being considered.  The problem with all of this is that such measures are being discussed or implemented as though the Constitution doesn’t exist.  

Are decisions being made by local, state and national officials, all in the name of protecting everyone’s health, setting the stage for Americans to lose their civil liberties?  Mat took the rest of his time to discuss that issue and you can hear his conclusions when you review this important edition of Crosstalk.