In a Team Trump Online interview Monday, Rep. Debbie Lesko told Lara Trump that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had attempted to overturn President Trump’s decision to restrict travel from China in January.
“They were doing impeachment, that's all they cared about, while President Trump was working on banning travel from China to try to slow the spread,” said Lesko. “And Pelosi, if you remember, actually had a travel ban--she had the Ban Act. She was going to try to overturn President Trump's decision on that.”
Exact viewership numbers are not publicly available, but Trump’s campaign recently claimed that for the past seven weeks, Team Trump Online’s videos have each received “more than one million unique views across all platforms” (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.), suggesting Lesko’s comments may have been seen by a large number of viewers.
Lesko’s claims are a variation on old claims that Pelosi opposed the president’s coronavirus travel ban, based on her opposition to a travel ban announced the same day—this one entirely unrelated to coronavirus. On January 31, the White House announced not only that travel was being restricted (though not entirely banned) from China to prevent the spread of coronavirus, but also the expansion of Executive Order 13780, a 2017 order from President Trump that limits travel from certain countries the government considers high risk for terrorism from entering the U.S. When Pelosi voiced opposition to a travel ban, she was referring to the expansion of the 2017 order, not the coronavirus travel restrictions.
In response to Executive Order 13780, House Democrats drafted the NO BAN Act (presumably the act Lesko was referring to in her Team Trump Online interview). The bill, which was first introduced in the House on April 10, 2019, well before the coronavirus pandemic began and “imposes limitations on the President's authority to suspend or restrict aliens from entering the United States and terminates certain presidential actions implementing such restrictions. It also prohibits religious discrimination in various immigration-related decisions, such as whether to issue an immigrant or non-immigrant visa, unless there is a statutory basis for such discrimination.” Importantly, while Republican leaders suggested the bill would limit the president’s ability to restrict foreign travelers from entering the country during the pandemic, the bill was not created toward these ends, as Lesko claims. It is false to claim that Pelosi proposed legislation to overturn Trump’s travel restrictions on China.
Photograph by Graeme Jennings/AFP/Getty Images.
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Pelosi's "No Ban Act" is utterly ridiculous on its merits, since it ignores the facts underlying the bans that she says it's about. I actually agree that Presidential power on the subject should be restricted, but that's only acceptable if Congress simultaneously steps in and requires roughly the same limitations that Trump put into place.
And, of course, it was also developed alongside and would prevent the coronavirus bans in question. It beggars belief to claim that the ban on Chinese travel isn't relevant to that decision, especially when Pelosi was explicitly contradicting the administration at that stage. Even if left-wing fact checkers couldn't find evidence that she'd specifically opposed it, there's adequate evidence that both she and members of her party were opposing social distancing, referring to the references to it as racist, etc.
Is there any evidence that Pelosi supported the travel ban or thought it should be stronger? Because supporting the No Ban Act, as she did, certainly looks like she opposed it, and I don't think any honest fact check could make the claim made here without actual proof to the contrary.
At the very least, the No Ban Act would have overturned Trump's ban on travel from China, and Pelosi supported that. So the subtitle here is a lie. Yes, I'm calling Alec Dent a liar. He's written an entire post which doesn't support his claim that someone else was lying. And we're at four posts in a row now which started with an irrebuttable presumption that the Republican was lying. That's inexcusable for a publication that wants to tell the truth, much less one that's supposed to be at least presumptively conservative.
What is utterly ridiculous is believing that any travel ban could stop something as slippery as this virus, or believing that we knew enough, sans any testing, to know precisely how it arrived on our shores. At this point Italy is still a better contender, although China is undoubtedly the original source.
As to the right/left arguments on the ban: it may surprise some of you, but there have actually been complaints on the left that the Trump's travel ban was not restrictive enough.