Trump-appointed judge rules: 'No masks needed on airplanes.'
Trump-appointed judge rules: 'No masks needed on airplanes.'
Pulls the plug on the CDC.
We don’t need no stink’n doctors or scientists telling us what to do about Covid. — Judge Mizelle
That’s pretty much what Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle opined when she struck down the nationwide mask requirement on airplanes, trains, buses, and other public transportation on Monday, in what’s being called, “the latest and most egregious example of a judge acting as a partisan warrior in the COVID-19 culture wars.”
The ruling comes just at a time when parts of the country are experiencing a surge in new infections due to the BA.2 subvariant of Omicron. The TSA has announced they will not enforce the mandate and so far, the Biden administration seems to be okay with all this superspreading.
Judge Mizelle is a member of the right-wing Federalist Society and a well-connected Trump appointee for life. D.T. has appointed plenty more like her. So get used to it.
A former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, she was 33 at the time, making her the youngest person D.T. had appointed to a life-tenured judgeship. He appointed her to the bench in November 2020, after he had lost re-election.
The American Bar Association declared her “not qualified” because of her lack of experience, but Republican senators confirmed her in a party-line vote. She is the eighth Trump judge to be confirmed to the federal bench despite a "not qualified" rating.
For the last few years, she had been working as an associate at Trump's go-to law firm, Jones Day. She is also a member of the Teneo Network, a Koch Brothers organization that partners with hate groups. And in 2017, she got a fellowship from the Claremont Institute, which recently claimed that "America is not racist." She’s married to Trump loyalist, Chad Mizelle who served as D.T.’s Acting General Counsel at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and was recently hired to work at Jared Kushner’s $2 billion, Saudi-backed investment fund.
Pulling back on the travel mask requirement at this moment is “very, very concerning,” Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist and assistant professor at George Mason University, said.
“We’re definitely starting to see a trend up in cases,” she said. “My concern is that we may see what happened in the U.K., where they drastically pulled back restrictions and saw a significant surge, and this will contribute to rising numbers.”
Another medical expert heard from…
It’s odds-maker Nate Silver who pulls numbers out of his butt and decides that Judge Mizelle’s decision was okay and would likely only affect those “at the margin.” Not so funny thing is that Silver describes himself as “Not a virologist” in his Twitter profile.
My brother Fred responds…
The most troubling story for me came from a mother of two in mid-flight on Delta when the pilot announced that passengers could remove their masks.
