Democrat President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice asked a federal judge this week to overturn a court order earlier this spring that declared the administration’s mask mandate on public transportation to be unlawful.
NBC News reported that the appeal came shortly before a court filing deadline was about to pass. The report noted that “the rate of unruly air passenger incidents fell to its lowest level since late 2020 soon after the judge’s mask mandate ruling.”
“The findings in the CDC order likewise provide ample support for the agency’s determination that there was good cause to make the order effective without delay,” the DOJ said in its appeal. “None of the district court’s quarrels with the CDC order comes close to showing that the CDC has acted outside the ‘zone of reasonableness.’”
U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle in Tampa terminated the administration’s mandate in mid-April, ruling that the mandate “exceeded the CDC’s statutory authority, improperly invoked the good cause exception to notice and comment rulemaking, and failed to adequately explain its decisions.”
The ruling said that Court declared the mandate to be unlawful because “our system does not permit agencies to act unlawfully even in pursuit of desirable ends.”
“The Court DECLARES UNLAWFUL and VACATES the Mask Mandate, remanding it to the CDC for further proceedings consistent with this order,” Mizelle ordered. “The Court directs the Clerk to TERMINATE President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., as a Defendant to this action, to ENTER final judgment in favor of Plaintiffs as prescribed in this order, and to CLOSE this case.”
The move by the Biden administration comes as Biden has failed to stop the COVID-19 pandemic like he promised he would while campaigning to be president.
More Americans have died under Biden’s leadership than died under the previous administration despite the fact that Biden had multiple highly effective vaccines at the start of his presidency to fight the pandemic.
The administration’s push to have mask mandates again on airplanes comes after The New York Times called into question the efficacy of mask mandates in a report published this week.
“In U.S. cities where mask use has been more common, Covid has spread at a similar rate as in mask-resistant cities,” The New York Times reported. “Mask mandates in schools also seem to have done little to reduce the spread. Hong Kong, despite almost universal mask-wearing, recently endured one of the world’s worst Covid outbreaks.”