Freedom Skies! No More Face Muzzles!

... Biden’s “Mask Mandate” on federal airplanes is illegal, a federal judge ruled on Monday in a setback to Biden’s COVID-19 agenda.

One day after taking office, Biden issued Executive Order (EO) 13998, ordering the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to develop the Mask Mandate, and for various other federal agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to implement the CDC’s decisions. EO 13998 also covered airports and other public transportation, such as buses.

CDC issued its initial order on January 29, 2021, pursuant to Biden’s EO. Among other things, it requires almost everyone ages two and up to wear masks in airports and on airplanes, with certain narrow exceptions such as between bites when they are eating....

Monday’s ruling was on one of the earliest cases, filed in July 2021. The lawsuit alleged that the Mask Mandate violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) on three separate grounds: First, that issuing the order is beyond CDC’s statutory authority granted by Congress in 42 U.S.C. § 264a. Second, that the CDC’s action was really a rule (i.e., a regulation) rather than an order, and therefore had to go through a process of public notice and opportunity for public comment before taking effect. And third, that it violates the APA because it is “arbitrary and capricious,” meaning that it was not the result of reasoned decisionmaking....

... Covid protocols were doing nothing to stop the pandemic... At some point, it felt like any run-of-the-mill dystopian movie: the goal of the despotic government is to manufacture a crisis so that people live in fear and obey....

The Biden administration had already made a massive miscalculation in January 2021 by announcing 100 days of masking in order to stop the virus, and of course (and who didn’t know this would happen?) the 100 days came and went and the spread was worse than ever and the mask mandate persisted....

I was genuinely surprised at the way the entire machinery of compulsion and control unraveled, not in months, not in days, but in hours and minutes. One airline after another announced that they would no longer enforce it. Amtrak joined. Even the D.C. metro said no more.....

In my lifetime, I’m not sure I can remember a single other time when a federal government rule imposed upon an entire country, one that affected so many people on a daily basis, was suddenly declared to be completely illegal - not just newly illegal in light of new data but illegal all along. It means that the government, not the people, had been in violation of the law....

What lockdowns and mandates have done to society is a painful truth, and one that we will be dealing with for many years.... It did not happen by accident. It happened because a tiny group of intellectuals, who implausibly gained control over a machinery of power, believed that they had the power to remake the world and used a pandemic to try out their skills. ...