Eleven Senate Republicans and 64 House Republicans have sent a letter asking Joe Biden to pull California Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s nomination for Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary. The letter, which was signed by a number of prominent Republican legislators like Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Marsha Blackburn, Mo Brooks, and Chip Roy, among others, noted that Becerra has a number of issues that make him a bad fit for the job, including his desire to make illegal immigrants eligible for Medicaid.
Cotton-Bishop Letter to Bid… by John Binder
The letter reads, in part:
Mr. Becerra’s lack of healthcare experience, enthusiasm for replacing private health insurance with government-run Medicare-for-all, and embrace of radical policies on immigration, abortion, and religious liberty, render him unfit for any position of public trust, and especially for HHS Secretary.
…Compounding our concerns over Mr. Becerra’s lack of experience is his ardent support of radical policies that will inflict great harm on millions of Americans. At a time when Americans can least afford it, Mr. Becerra enthusiastically supports eliminating the private health insurance market for 160 million Americans, only to replace it with a government takeover branded as Medicare-for-all. The resulting reimbursement cuts would devastate rural health care providers working to stay solvent during the pandemic and would be a slap in the face to the doctors, nurses and other health care workers keeping our communities healthy and safe.
This radical position is not a recent or passing fancy. As Mr. Becerra proudly told California Healthline in 2019, “I’ve been a single-payer advocate all my life.” As the coronavirus continues to wreak havoc on our nation, Mr. Becerra’s determination to strip Americans of their private health insurance isn’t just bad policy, it’s dangerous.
Meanwhile, Mr. Becerra seeks to decriminalize illegal immigration, which would extend expensive government benefits like Medicaid to anyone who illegally crosses our borders.
Mr. Becerra’s radical views extend to his ardent support of abortion until the moment of birth. He opposed the 2003 partial-birth abortion ban and cosponsored legislation that would force religious employers like Hobby Lobby to cover the morning-after pill, even in the face of sincerely held religious objections.
Indeed, Mr. Becerra has long shown contempt for anyone who doesn’t agree with his radical leftist agenda. As California’s Attorney General, Mr. Becerra targeted social conservatives and religious groups with legal challenges and prosecution. He unconstitutionally forced houses of worship into lockdown while Governor Gavin Newsom and San Francisco Mayor London Breed attended dinner parties at the French Laundry. He prosecuted pro-life activists who documented Planned Parenthood executives’ conversations about selling the body parts of aborted babies. Finally, he defended a California law that targeted pro-life crisis pregnancy centers while exempting clinics focused on birth control.
Democratic Senator Joe Manchin has declined to say whether he would support Becerra’s nomination and if he were to vote against it, one Republican would have to cross the aisle and vote for Becerra to get him confirmed. How that will play out remains to be seen.
Of course, giving Medicaid to illegal aliens is so obviously a bad idea that it’s hard to believe there are people that support it. Not only would it draw more illegal aliens here, it incentivizes the sickest illegal aliens to come here. If you have some horrible disease, you can’t afford decent medical treatment and you can manage it, why not sneak across the border and get first-rate medical treatment paid for by America’s taxpayers? That’s the world Xavier Becerra wants to create and apparently, Joe Biden agrees with him or he wouldn’t have nominated him to be the Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary.
John Hawkins is the author of 101 Things All Young Adults Should Know
