CDC, TSA cry ‘uncle,’ let mask mandate for travelers end in another win for unqualified Trump judge

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The Biden administration is as of now not moving to block an order from a federal district court judge invalidating the mask mandate for transportation hubs including airports and train stations. A Biden administration official told CNN that the mask rule will not be in effect while the administration reviews the ruling.

“The agencies are reviewing the decision and assessing potential next steps,” the Biden administration official said Monday night. “In the meantime, today’s court decision means CDC’s public transportation masking order is not in effect at this time. Therefore, TSA will not enforce its Security Directives and Emergency Amendment requiring mask use on public transportation and transportation hubs at this time. CDC recommends that people continue to wear masks in indoor public transportation settings.” Major airlines and Amtrak quickly moved to drop their mask requirements for travelers.

So once again, an inexperienced and unqualified conservative activist judge is making federal policy. Trump-appointed judges have blocked or struck down the administration’s vaccine requirements for federal contractors, vaccine requirements for health care workers, vaccine requirements for federal workers, and now masks for domestic travelers. Those are just a few of the more than a dozen rulings taken by Trump judges to delay or block important Biden policies.

“Moreover,” writes People for the American Way’s Elliot Mincberg, who detailed these rulings in a report for PFAW, “the methods used by Trump judges—including nationwide injunctions by Trump judges in a single district, unsigned ‘shadow docket’ rulings with little or no explanation, and judicial second-guessing of expert health and other agency determinations—threaten to do even more damage in the future.” That report is from September 2021, when Trump judges had blocked just 15 of Biden’s policies.

This is the definition of “activist” when it comes to judges—they’re not “legislating from the bench,” as conservatives have always tried to paint liberal judges. They are policy-making from the bench, subverting the co-equal executive branch to prevent a Democratic president and his executive branch from using its constitutional power to govern.

And doing it in as ham-handed, unprincipled, and just plain wacky ways as you would expect from unqualified judges. The latest ruling from Florida woman, district court Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, is “your brain on textualism,” writes Lisa Needham. “In an order that reads like that of a particularly long-winded law student, she marched through not one, not two, but three dictionaries to determine that the word ‘sanitation’ cannot encompass face masks, because face masks don’t clean anything.”

This is real. That’s what Mizelle actually argued. “At most, it traps virus droplets. But it neither ‘sanitizes’ the person wearing the mask nor ‘sanitizes’ the conveyance,” she wrote of mask usage. Never mind that trapping virus droplets so that they don’t a) infect the wearer or b) spread to another person IS THE WHOLE POINT.

It is also worth remembering that this judge—the tenth Trump judge deemed “not qualified” by the American Bar Association confirmed by Mitch McConnell’s Republican Senate—was elevated to that position after Donald Trump had lost the election. She was confirmed by McConnell and team in a rush of votes that the Senate was completing instead of doing anything to help the American people still suffering the worst of the pandemic. This was before there were vaccinations available, and as the previous rounds of aid were being depleted.

There are myriad ways in which this is horrifying. Here’s just one: how Judge Mizelle and her husband Chad are positioning themselves to be the next Clarence and Ginni Thomas. She did clerk for him, after all.

Thus the conservative death cult masquerading as “pro-life” strikes again.

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