To the great relief of normal people, mask mandates for passengers traveling on domestic carriers(probably any carrier traversing embarking disembarking in the US) have been ruled unlawful as they are a regulatory overreach by agencies of government. The gist of the federal district court ruling out of Florida’s which has been issued and now observed as a national injunction is that agencies issuing and enforcing the edict had every opportunity to go through normal processes prior to issuing regulations rather than using any emergency authority. They did not and that is unlawful.
The Constitution and laws of the land cannot be suspended by bureaucrats or an administration in claimed times of an emergency when timely mechanisms exist to follow established lawful procedures have been ignored. The edicts related to the COVID 19 / Wuhan flu have generally been an egregious assault on human and constitutional rights.
We excerpt an Epoch Times article regarding the ruling which includes a link to the full opinion of the judge. However we feel compelled to address the issue of the ability of Federal Districts courts to issue nationwide injunctions. It is a more modern “progressive” judicial activist legal phenomenon that has been going on for decades and is generally suspect. It tends to invite judge shopping for one thing. We wonder what happens if a district judge in another appellate jurisdiction or even the same one issues an opinion with the opposite legal effect. Is every district judge a Supreme Court for the day??
There may be judicial canons that inhibit certain applications or guide applicability. We presume the Florida judges actions are within such acceptability. We want to emphasize the judge made the right call and with intellectual authority. That the Biden Administration didn’t immediately issue a commitment to appeal the judges ruling is telling. Making noise is not the same thing.
We now see that the Biden corruption (our word for the Resident Biden apparat, (also note use of “resident” instead of “president”) has decided to appeal the ruling but without requesting a stay. If the mask mandate was really so compelling from a health standpoint why not pursue an immediate stay? The answer is because they know it is not and mask mandates are deeply unpopular with normal people. The politics leading up to the midterms are that they want this irritant off the table ASAP and the optics of defending the dropping of Title 42 regarding illegal immigrants – the pandemic restriction at the US border – removing a restriction on admission of invaders — no worries about COVID with them — but travel restrictions for citizens was a bit too much even for Biden people. They do want the power to issue mandates at will, and that is the reason for the appeal without the stay demand.
Federal Judge Strikes Down CDC Mask Mandate for Planes, Travel
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) mask mandate for airplanes and other forms of public transportation was struck down on April 18 by a federal judge.
U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle said the CDC rule exceeded the agency’s statutory authority because its implementation violated administrative law. Mizelle, a Trump appointee based in Florida, directed the agency to reverse the policy nationwide in response to a lawsuit filed by the Health Freedom Defense Fund.
The CDC violated the Administrative Procedure Act because it didn’t give notice before imposing the mandate in February 2021, Mizelle wrote in a 59-page summary judgment.
“At the time when the CDC issued the mandate, the COVID-19 pandemic had been ongoing for almost a year and COVID-19 cases were decreasing,” she wrote. “This timing undercuts the CDC’s suggestion that its action was so urgent that a thirty-day comment period was contrary to the public interest. So too, the CDC’s delay in issuing the mandate further undercuts its position.”
Public comment, in this case, is necessary, the judge wrote, because the mandate would “constrain their choices and actions via threats and civil and criminal penalties.”
Mizelle also found that the mandate, which was imposed in February 2021, exceeded the CDC’s statutory authority.
The agency had claimed that the Public Health Services Act of 1944 gave it the power to regulate travelers, but the judge disagreed, finding that the law only grants the agency the ability “to directly regulate individuals only if they are traveling into the United States from abroad or are ‘reasonably believed to be infected with a communicable disease in a qualifying stage.’”
The CDC and the White House didn’t respond to requests for comment.
It’s not clear if the Department of Justice will try to file an appeal or how quickly the ruling will be implemented across the United States, namely at airports. Several weeks ago, the CDC announced that it would extend the mask mandate until at least May 3, despite calls from airline companies and groups to end the policy
The judge’s decision is yet another blow to the Biden administration’s COVID-19 mandates. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court struck down an Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule directing tens of millions of workers at larger private companies to receive vaccines, but left intact a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services rule requiring health care workers to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.
Other CDC orders issued during the COVID-19 pandemic have also been struck down by judges, including an eviction moratorium and an order pertaining to cruises.
“Before COVID, the CDC had really played more of a background role, a sort of advise and consent role to the state public health authorities. It had never before sort of come to the forefront of a public health situation and said we’re going to dictate, directly dictate how people can conduct themselves and how people can use their property. And that was really unprecedented,” Brant Hadaway, an attorney for the plaintiffs in the mask mandate case, told The Epoch Times.
“And so the pattern is really that when a federal agency, which is part of the executive branch of government, suddenly starts claiming newfound powers in a statute that has existed for decades, the courts are going to take a close look at that. And that’s what the courts have been doing.” . . .
