The Playacting Over Masks Really Needed to End

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The U.S.-government mandate requiring mask wearing on transportation is now dead, and it was killed in the worst way possible. A judge deemed “not qualified” by the American Bar Association wrote a muddled decision that invalidated a regulation hated by the president who picked her, while overriding the authority of the executive branch and its expert advisers to make policy.

And yet, Federal District Judge Kathryn Mizelle just did President Joe Biden a favor. She got him out from under a policy that served little purpose. His administration will challenge the Trump-appointed jurist’s ruling—and it should, not to reimpose the mandate, but to preserve the power of the executive branch to issue national health regulations when needed.

But Biden should be glad, as the airlines clearly are, that the masking theater is over. Mask mandates were a stopgap, an emergency safety measure imposed by governments with few other options to stem the pandemic, and they fell away in other areas