By BETHANY BLANKLEY
THE CENTER SQUARE SENIOR REPORTER
(The Center Square) — U.S. Rep. Beth Van Duyne, R-Texas, represented by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the state of Texas are suing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, challenging the constitutionality of its requirement that people wear masks on commercial airlines, conveyances and at transportation hubs.
The lawsuit is likely to go to the U.S. Supreme Court, TPPF said, where the foundation thinks it will prevail. The statute being used to justify the CDC airline mask mandate is the same one used to justify the eviction moratorium over which TPPF sued and the Supreme Court struck down last year.
The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas Fort Worth Division. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; its director, Rochelle Walensky; CDC Chief of Staff Sherri Berger; the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and its secretary, Xavier Becerra; and the U.S. government, are all named as defendants.
The plaintiffs are asking for the court to issue an immediate injunction against the mandate, and to end it for good. It’s set to expire in March, but the CDC is expected to extend it again, as it has in the past over the past nearly two years, unless a judge blocks it.
As long as the airline mask mandate has been imposed, most Americans have assumed that because the federal government has control over U.S. airspace, it can control what policies the airlines must implement, including the mask mandate, TPPF General Counsel Robert Henneke told The Center Square. But after looking at the statute the Biden administration used to justify the CDC mandate, that’s not the case, Mr. Henneke said.
What the Biden administration did, he argues, is unconstitutional.
“Congress has never passed a law authorizing the executive branch to issue blanket mask mandates on American citizens,” Mr. Henneke said.
The U.S. Constitution grants the executive branch the authority to enforce laws passed by Congress and grants Congress the authority to make laws.
“The executive branch does not have independent policy-making authority,” he said.
After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the CDC eviction moratorium imposed on residential landlords, and struck down the private sector COVID-19 vaccine mandate — two cases over which TPPF sued and won — Mr. Henneke said the foundation began looking into other mandates that it believed were also unconstitutional and/or not justified by federal statute.
“When we took a hard look at the alleged justification from the government, the justification isn’t there,” he told The Center Square. “The statute the Biden administration claimed gave the CDC authority, didn’t give the CDC authority.”
