My colleagues on the Left must be really worried about their social credit scores these days.
While Chinese President Xi Jinping’s murderous regime hosts the Winter Olympics, Nancy Pelosi decided to give him an early gold medal by passing the so-called America COMPETES Act.
Hyped as a way to strengthen U.S. industry while standing up to Beijing, the bill turned out to be a farce, mentioning “coral reefs” more times than China, naming “climate change” 156 times, and appropriating billions for a United Nations global warming slush fund — that pays out to China!
This is doubly embarrassing, given China’s criminal actions against its own citizens and the world at large: genocide, religious persecution, censorship, economic warfare, industrial espionage, and threatening Taiwan, not to mention cultivating and unleashing a devastating virus upon the planet.
Meanwhile, the establishment Left in Washington, Wall Street, and Hollywood bend over backward to avoid offending the communist government — all while importing its censorship, heavy-handed lockdowns, mandates, and decrees and refusing to investigate the increasingly likely theory that COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese lab in Wuhan.
This is unacceptable. We can — we must — stand up to China, condemn its crimes, and give U.S. industry the tools to compete and win.
That’s why I am introducing the Stop Funding our Adversaries Act of 2022, which would prohibit the federal government from using tax dollars to conduct research or cooperate with the Chinese government. We should not continue sending money to the people who poisoned our world and covered it up, whether they are in China or the United States.
I’m also introducing the Protecting American Lives Act, which would require the Food and Drug Administration to identify rules and regulations that make it harder to produce lifesaving drugs in America, so we can clear them out of the way and bring our pharmaceutical production home from China. After the shortages and supply chain issues we have seen over the last two years, we should not enable authoritarian regimes to have a stranglehold upon precious medicines.
Finally, I am working on legislation that would improve vetting standards for Chinese nationals coming to the U.S. for education or research. Sadly, spying and influence-peddling has become all too common among Chinese-affiliated groups such as Confucius Institutes.
I hope that one day, the people of China may join the free men and women of the world in peace. But as long as the Chinese Communist Party practices its particular brand of thuggery at home and abroad, we must not look the other way.
The public deserves a bright future, disentangled from China’s corruption and divested from its slave labor. I hope all my colleagues in Congress will join me in standing up for America and standing up to China.
Yvette Herrell represents New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District.
