Sen. Tom Cotton said Friday he believes President Donald Trump's plan for reopening the country is the "right approach," as an arbitrary deadline can't be set for the entire country, but also said work must be done to help curb the United States' dependence on Chinese goods.
"Obviously we have to be prepared for any surge in new cases as we begin to do that," the Arkansas Republican said on Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "But I think it's the right approach to begin to get the economy back on its feet."
However, he said, the United States is in a tough situation where China is concerned, as it has the "market cornered" on medical supplies and on some of the components for coronavirus testing, but plans must be made to end the dependence on the Chinese in the future.
"We don't want to rush into this change," he said. "We don't want to say that we are going to put import bans on Chinese goods in place next week because we have to have those goods now to protect our doctors and our nurses and all the people struggling with this virus."
He added that circumstantial evidence is "stacking up pretty quickly" that the novel coronavirus originated in labs in Wuhan rather than in a local food market.
"We know that China has a very sloppy history of laboratory safety," said Cotton. "Some of our own diplomats at the embassy in China went to these labs as far as back as two years ago and said the practices there were very alarming. And you can see how the Chinese Communist Party has continued to lie about this from the very beginning as if they have something to cover up."
Cotton and Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, have introduced the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which allows foreign officials to be sued in U.S. courts.
"This is exactly what Congress did for the victims of 9/11," said Cotton." "We should do it for the victims of this pandemic."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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