Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt joined some 22 other Republican Attorney Generals in signing an amicus brief opposing the appeal of a ruling that blocked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from enforcing a mask mandate on interstate travel.
“What the state attorneys general argued was very consistent with what we had argued initially and with what the judge ruled but they reinforced it to a great extent,” said Leslie Manookian, president and founder of the Health Freedom Defense Fund (HFDF), which filed the underlying legal action. “They essentially argued that there were several issues that the CDC is wrong on and which must be upheld by the appellate court.”
In Health Freedom Defense Fund Inc. vs. Joseph R. Biden, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida ruled that the Biden Administration and the CDC are not authorized to force travelers to wear masks on flights or on buses. However, the Biden Administration has appealed the decision.
“If there are representatives or officials in government who back your position, then that's not a bad thing,” Manookian told the St. Louis Record. “Not only did 22 states’ attorneys general, solicitor generals, and other representatives of those states submit an Amicus Brief, but also 15 members of Congress also submitted an Amicus Brief, and we've got health organizations and civil rights organizations of a variety of different groups that submitted on our behalf.”
The attorneys general brief, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, argues that the CDC’s mandate exceeds the agency’s authority in the following ways.
The mask mandate is not a sanitation measure
“They don't have the authority because they're claiming that masks are a sanitation measure, but masks don't clean anything or sanitize anything and they argued that after the fact,” Manookian said. “They never argued that upfront.”
The CDC failed to establish good cause to avoid notice and comment.
“Whenever they are going to issue any kind of a rule, they have to notify the public of that and then take comment and they didn't do that,” said Manookian. “What happened was Biden issued an executive order on his first full day in office and a week later, the CDC complied but they hadn't issued a mask mandate for the entire year before when Trump was president.”
The mask mandate is arbitrary and capricious
“The CDC can't act unless the local measures are inadequate but they never even looked at the states,” Manookian added. “They also have to follow their own internal process and they didn't do that. Judges are told if an agency fails to follow its own internal process and procedures, that is by definition, arbitrary and capricious, and the rule should be vacated.”
In addition to Missouri, the attorneys general from Florida, Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia and West Virginia joined the brief.