President Barack Obama's idea of appointing an
Ebola czar would be a public relations stunt that would do nothing to actually mitigate the spread of the deadly virus, political analyst Dick Morris said Friday on
Newsmax TV's "America's Forum."
"He never equips those czars with any authority," said Morris, author of
"Power Grab: Obama's Dangerous Plan for a One-Party Nation." "In other words, they're never able to overrule cabinet officials or other national security officials. They can't tell CDC what to do.
"They're sort of PR people that are put up there and really don't have much power. But in any case CDC has all the power it needs, but they are sitting there for months wondering if Ebola is going to come here."
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The CDC missed the ball when Liberian Thomas Eric Duncan showed up in Dallas in late September and was sent home from the ER despite showing symptoms of the disease and alerting hospital staff that he had just traveled from West Africa. Duncan died Oct. 8.
"A case shows up in Dallas and [the CDC] don't dispatch an emergency team to go to Dallas, two and a half hours away, and say, 'Hey, you've got to do this and this and this,' and as a result this patient sits unguarded in the emergency room for hours with 48 nurses having something to do with them," Morris said.
"Then they put him in an isolation unit, but people are breathing the air he's breathing because they don't know how it's spread," he said. "They don't have on hazmat suits, just masks, and his wastes, his refuse, is lying piled up to the ceiling in the corner.
"Oh my God, and people who are exposed to him are allowed to take round-trip flights and now one is on the cruise ship. Are you kidding me? It isn't like CDC had no notice."
The administration needs to institute a travel ban, Morris suggested, though it should have done so long before now.
"As [Obama] can see by the cruise ship and by the Maryland hospital and by the 48 people who were exposed to Duncan before he died, or the medical wastes stacked up there in the hospital, that it is way too late," Morris said. "Of course he should do it, but look, this is a disease that can be quarantined, and when you have a patient you quarantine him. And when you have a country that is rife with it, you quarantine it."
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He pointed out that most African nations have already issued
travel bans for West Africa, where Ebola is a pandemic.
"Kenya has imposed it, South Africa has imposed it, so if they're doing it why don't we?" he asked. "If you quarantine an individual you can quarantine a country. And fortunately bats, who are one of the major ways of spreading this, how it started in the first place, can't fly the Atlantic Ocean and without airplanes, neither can people and I believe a travel ban is an absolute requisite."
Should the GOP win the Senate majority in the midterms, they can put controls in place requiring specific programs to help curb the Ebola invasion from many angles, Morris said.
"The Congress — the Senate and the House — have the right to go through the budget line by line by line and assert or delete items and indicate requirements that are imposed on specific programs," he said. "The president does not have the right to veto that, he can either sign or veto the entire budget and that's it.
"What the Republicans can do if they control the Senate, they could attach a rider to the ICE Appropriation, resending any executive order that banned deportations and requiring that the process continue," he said.
"They can attach something to the HHS budget or the FAA budget, and say you have to have a ban on anybody coming into the country from Liberia or has a Liberian passport, or with a stamp on it from Liberia or any Ebola country.
"They can say to HHS, no money may be used to set up a payment advisory board to say who can and cannot get medical procedures to so-called death panel.
"Now if the Republicans overreach and they try to zero fund Obamacare, Obama will veto that budget and the government will close down and there will be hell to pay and the Republicans will be hurt," Morris said.
"But if they bullet point individual shots, they can make a huge difference and not have it rise to the level where Obama can veto it and that's a key point I make in the book, '
Power Grab' and I wanted to amplify it today because a lot of people are asking that question as the midterms approach."