Welcome to MAGA airspace. Just sit back and enjoy your flight.
Maybe you’re overjoyed that a federal judge has summarily nixed the federal mandate requiring masks on planes and other modes of public transit. Forgive me for not joining in. I’m flying a lot these days, and now I dread the very real prospect of being trapped six inches away from an unmasked anti-vaxxer who (for all I know) is Covid-positive. You know, because Freedom.
The Justice Department recently cited the 1944 federal public health law that empowers the government (in this case, the CDC) “to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases,” via “sanitation” and “other measures.” The law stipulates a broad use of the word sanitation. But yesterday, Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, based in Florida, concocted Alice in Wonderland reasoning to throw out the mask mandate, redefining sanitation in the narrowest way possible: “Wearing a mask cleans nothing. At most, it traps virus droplets. But it neither ‘sanitizes’ the person wearing the mask nor ‘sanitizes’ the conveyance.”
Then she went to bat for the aggrieved souls who feel inconvenienced by masks: “Anyone who refuses to comply with the condition of mask wearing is – in a sense – detained or partially quarantined by exclusion….(Passengers are) forcibly removed from their airplane seats, denied boarding at the bus stop, and turned away at the train station door.”
So who is this culture war partisan who imposed her policy preference on the rest of us?
For starters, she attended Florida’s Lakeland Christian School. She recently praised its “scripturally-based context where I was encouraged to think about how my faith informs what I am doing in the world. Faith and living are not two separate parts of my life….I think of my work, whether academic or now as a (law) clerk, as work that I’m doing unto the Lord, and I want to do my best for Him. I continue to strive to serve Him and I think that means giving your absolute best to whatever you’re doing and serving with a focus not to glorify yourself but to glorify Christ.”
I’m not knocking her for being religious. That’s her business. But it makes me a tad uneasy to think that her anti-mask ruling – which essentially dictates national health policy; which affects every flyer regardless of faith and health status – was guided by her desire to always do “her absolute best” to serve “unto the Lord.”
She’s a graduate of the Lakeland Christian School Covenant College, and received her law degree in 2012. That’s not a misprint; she’s barely 10 years out of law school. In fact, she has so little experience that when she was nominated for the federal bench in 2020, the American Bar Association rated her as “not qualified” for the job, citing the fact that she’d never tried a single case as lead-counsel or co-counsel.
Did I mention that she was nominated for the job by Donald Trump? But you knew that was coming. She’s just another a cog in the MAGA judicial machine. After all, she clerked for Clarence Thomas, she was part of the Federalist Society pipeline, and her husband worked for Trump in the Homeland Security agency.
She was confirmed in November 2020 by the lame-duck Republican Senate after Trump was defeated. Forty-nine Republicans gave her the job; none dissented. It’s also noteworthy that while only 3 Senate Republicans decided last month that the eminently qualified Ketanji Brown Jackson belonged on the high court, 49 decided that the ill-qualified young white lady had the requisite creds for a federal judgeship.
I cannot possibly puzzle out the reasons for that asymmetry.
Lots of flyers reportedly cheered yesterday when she ruled against the masks. Her defenders also insist that masks on planes aren’t necessary because the air filtration is so good, conveniently forgetting that air filtration is typically minimal when the planes are boarding, taxiing on the runway, or stranded on the tarmac. Or that even health professionals have no idea at this point whether the new Omicron sub-variant is more transmissable than its predecessor in a flying tube.
Oh well. I suppose I should just get with the MAGA program – dump the mask, and tough shit for the immunocompromised on board. And maybe I should aim a laser at my private parts (Tucker Carlson calls it “testicle tanning”) to boost my manliness. Is this a great country or what?