A 35-year-old federal judge, appointed to the bench in 2020 by Donald Trump despite receiving a “not qualified” rating by the American Bar Association and having only been out of law school seven years before getting her lifetime appointment to the bench, is raising eyebrows regarding her decision to strike down the CDC mask mandate for public transit, CNN reports.
US District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle of the Middle District of Florida, in a 59-page decision, ruled that the requirement to wear a mask on plane and train rides to protect passengers who may have compromised health and remove people who don’t from planes and trains was equivalent to “detention and quarantine”
In her decision overturning decisions by two courts, Mizelle cited debunked claims that masks aren’t helpful in restricting the spread of the virus and that masks multiply the risk to the mask wearer. She opined that the rule was beyond the authority of the CDC and an effort to extend its power.
“As a result, the Mask Mandate is best understood not as sanitation, but as an exercise of the CDC’s power to conditionally release individuals to travel despite concerns that they may spread a communicable disease (and to detain or partially quarantine those who refuse),” she wrote. “But the power to conditionally release and detain is ordinarily limited to individuals entering the United States from a foreign country.”
The Department of Justice lawyers, however, noted the rule had been held up by the Supreme Court. “The Supreme Court has thrice rejected that relief, and so has every Court of Appeals to consider the issue – that is, the Fourth, Eighth, Eleventh, and D.C. Circuits – as well as the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida,” the Justice Department said in that case, referring to en earlier lawsuit brought in Florida’s Middle District. “No court has granted such relief, and not a single Judge or Justice has noted their dissent from any of these orders.”