Abbreviated pundit roundup: Trump judge bans masks for travel, InfoWars bankruptcy, and more
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Not surprisingly, a Trump-appointed Florida judge has banned masks for travel. We begin today’s roundup with an analysis of the decision from Lawrence Gostin at The Daily Beast:
On Monday, Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle in Florida threw out the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s mask mandate for air travel and other forms of mass transportation. Deaths from COVID-19—and the mask mandates intended to prevent them—may be on the wane nationwide, but whatever you think about such policies, this is the latest and most egregious example of a judge acting as a partisan warrior in the COVID-19 culture wars.
Mizelle was appointed to the federal bench by President Trump in 2020. She was 33, and had been practicing law for only 8 years. She had nevertried a case as a lead attorney. The Senate confirmed her even though the American Bar Association gave her a rating of “not qualified.” This nominee should have been rejected by the Senate not because of her judicial philosophy and not because of her age, but because she simply didn’t have the credentials and experience to be a federal judge with lifetime tenure.
Now she is substituting her opinion for that of scientific professionals at the CDC, and dictating health policy in America. The outcome could be disastrous, only serving to further embolden the right-wing activists who dispute the reality of this horrifically lethal pandemic.
So if I am denied entry to a swimming pool because I have open, festering sores all over my torso, then I really am being “detained” on the sidewalk? If they won’t let me into the movie theater because of my visible case of the Black Death, I really have been “quarantined” in the parking lot? I am neither a lawyer, nor do I play one on this blog, but this does not impress me as legal reasoning. But, Lordy, does it make sense as politics.
You see, Judge Mizelle is one of those folks that the Federalist Society sent up the pneumatic tube that led from its labs to the White House. She clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and was rated as “not qualified” by the American Bar Association. She was 33 when she was nominated and confirmed as the 2020 lame-duck session was winding down. She was eight years out of law school and had never tried a case of any kind. Her husband was chosen to be acting general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security through his connection to that noted devotee of the Constitution, Stephen Miller. She had no experience, but she had the golden resume.
The RNC has pulled out of presidential debates. Here’s David Frum’s take:
Debate organizers may now try to appease the RNC, but the effort may well only make an already tense situation worse. If you believe that Chris Wallace is biased against Republicans, whom would you regard as an acceptable alternative? Joe Rogan? Tucker Carlson? Alex Jones? Russian state TV’s Vladimir Solovyov? Maybe the only way to satisfy [Trump] fans is to just let Trump interview himself for 90 minutes, to be followed by a panel applauding Trump and ridiculing his rival?
At New York magazine, Matt Stieb has the details on InfoWars going broke:
It’s reaping season for Alex Jones’s pan-conspiracist outfit down in Austin, Texas. After years of sowing misinformation and hate through the vaudevillian rants of its owner, Infowars filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday.
According to court filings, the website’s frequent shilling of overpriced dietary supplements was not enough to stave off financial trouble. Infowars claims it has as many as 48 creditors and up to $10 million in estimated liabilities — with estimated assets of $50,000 or less.
Kat Bouza breaks down the Taylor Lorenz/Libs of Tik Tok story making the rounds:
When a well-known reporter on the internet culture beat writes about a viral right-wing social media account, what’s the proper response? Well, if you’re a conservative on the internet, the best course of action is to get really upset and let everyone on Twitter know just how you’re feeling.
That’s the method a special segment of Twitter deployed Monday upon learning of Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz’s plans to publish a story about the wildly popular (and much maligned) Libs of TikTok — an openly bigoted and homophobic social media account that reposts so-called “liberal” content culled from various platforms repackaged to produce maximum engagement via rage clicks.
On a final note in case you missed it, here is Jane Mayer’s analysis of the campaign against Biden’s nominees:
Rather than attack a single candidate or nominee, the [American Accountability Foundation]. aims to thwart the entire Biden slate. The obstructionism, like the Republican blockade of Biden’s legislative agenda in Congress, is the end in itself. The group hosts a Web site, bidennoms.com, that displays the photographs of Administration nominees it has targeted, as though they were hunting trophies. And the A.A.F. hasn’t just undermined nominees for Cabinet and Court seats—the kinds of prominent people whose records are usually well known and well defended. It’s also gone after relatively obscure, sub-Cabinet-level political appointees, whose public profiles can be easily distorted and who have little entrenched support. The A.A.F., which is run by conservative white men, has particularly focussed on blocking women and people of color. As of last month, more than a third of the twenty-nine candidates it had publicly attacked were people of color, and nearly sixty per cent were women.