Joe Biden’s COVID Power Grab

Joe Biden is once again sending Americans a clear signal that, as long as he has anything to do with it, COVID mandates and restrictions are not going anywhere anytime soon.

Just two days after a federal judge ruled to strike down mask requirements on airplanes and other modes of public transportation, the Department of Justice (DOJ) appealed the ruling, claiming mask mandates remain urgent for “public health”: “It is CDC’s continuing assessment that at this time an order requiring masking in the indoor transportation corridor remains necessary for the public health,” the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in a press release in support of the DOJ’s appeal.

But the American people should not mistake the Biden administration’s umpteenth attempt to prolong pandemic-era restrictions as a bid to “protect public health.” Polls show that an overwhelming majority of Americans no longer see COVID as a “crisis,” and even Dr. Anthony Fauci himself recently assured the nation that we are “out of the pandemic phase.” Moreover, global COVID deaths have plummeted to their lowest point since March 2020.

In reality, the Biden administration’s objective in appealing the ruling is clear: thirst for power. Even the CDC virtually acknowledged as much in its press release: “CDC believes this is a lawful order,” the statement reads, “well within CDC’s legal authority to protect public health.” In other words, the CDC wants to impose unscientific and unpopular mask mandates on the American public simply because it thinks it can.

The past two years have indicated beyond any reasonable doubt that Democrats—in defiance of all scientific data—are attempting to drag out COVID-related mandates and restrictions for as long as they possibly can, even when the American people have evidently moved on and simply want to live their lives in a post-COVID, post-mandate world. As such, the Biden administration’s countless efforts to extend federal mask requirements and other COVID-related rules for unspecified lengths of time should be seen for what they are: raw power grabs that seek to suppress the will of the people at the hands of unelected federal bureaucrats.

From the very moment COVD reached American shores more than two years ago, the CDC has done everything in its ability to usurp as much power as possible—a trend that has only intensified since Biden took office. In the early days of the pandemic, for instance, the CDC sought to use COVID to prevent landlords from evicting tenants who failed to pay rent, a move that was ultimately ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The Biden administration has since falsely insisted that the CDC possesses the power to require every public school student in the United States to wear a mask during the school day, in addition to a deluge of other draconian policies completely detached from both science and the law.

The DOJ’s desire to indefinitely extend mask mandates on airplanes is just the latest in a long series of examples of the left’s eagerness to weaponize federal institutions for their own ideological aims. If the CDC (or any other federal bureaucracy comprised of unelected government officials) succeeds in appealing the judge’s ruling, who’s to say when mask mandates will finally end, if at all? Even more concerningly, should the administration be successful in its appeal, who’s to say what it won’t have the authority do going forward?

For more than two years, Democrats in the federal government have disingenuously used COVID as a false pretext to amass unprecedented amounts of federal power—and there’s no reason to believe they will stop anytime soon. Unfortunately, it is exceedingly likely that the same individuals and institutions currently behind the nation’s never-ending COVID mandates will use similar legal and political maneuvers to advance prized left-wing policy goals relating to climate change, immigration, or ‘woke’ culture war issues at some point in the future.

Ironically, the very people who have spent the better part of the last year contending that democracy is under attack and authoritarianism is lurking just around the corner are, in fact, the same people responsible for eroding democratic self-government, thwarting the rule of law, and sabotaging the separation of powers.

If the DOJ, CDC, and other federal agencies were concerned about retaining the trust of Americans, they would act quickly to stop with their power plays, end their flirtation with left-wing tyranny, and return power back to where it belongs—with the people.

But, regrettably, as long Biden remains at the helm, it is likely that these patterns of autocratic overreach are here to stay.

Matthew Whitaker is co-chair of the Center for Law and Justice at the America First Policy Institute and the former Acting Attorney General under the Trump administration.