Neither Ms. Daza nor Ms. Pope responded to requests for interviews, but, according to an interview with Ms. Manookian, they are two of the approximately 10,000 people who paid $10 to join her organization over the past two years.
On its website, the Health Freedom Defense Fund says “we stand for choice, and we stand for the most basic of human rights, bodily autonomy.” An example of “standing up for freedom,” the website says, is “deciding to forgo a mask in places and situations where you are not absolutely forced to wear one.”
Early in the pandemic, Ms. Manookian said, she began to feel angry and concerned about all the mask and vaccine rules.
“I saw very strident measures being taken, which violated, I think, basic American liberties,” she said. She founded her organization, which is based in Wyoming, “to educate the populace about their rights” and to help them file lawsuits, whenever those rights were infringed upon, she said.
The transportation mask mandate, which Ms. Manookian called “the tip of the spear” in an alarming sea of “legislative creep” was one of the first measures she decided that her organization should challenge. The group has been involved in more than a dozen lawsuits against mask and vaccine mandates across the country.
In deciding whether or not the C.D.C. had overstepped, Judge Mizelle focused in part on the word “sanitation,” ultimately ruling that mask-wearing didn’t meet a definition she found in several dictionaries and other sources. Sanitation refers to “measures that clean something,” she wrote. “Wearing a mask cleans nothing,” she concluded.
A different judge might have skipped the focus on sanitation altogether given that the law also allows for “other measures,” Mr. Gostin said. Or that judge might have taken a broader view of the word sanitation.
“She interprets sanitation in its narrowest way, even though that’s not consistent with the way that it’s been used in public health law for centuries,” said Lindsay Wiley, an expert on public health law at U.C.L.A. School of Law.
Since the ruling, some critics have focused on the fact that the American Bar Association deemed Judge Mizelle not qualified for a life-tenured judicial seat, citing her courtroom inexperience; she was just 33 when Mr. Trump appointed her after he lost the 2020 election.
But Judge Mizelle had sterling credentials within the conservative legal movement. After graduating from the University of Florida law school, she went on to clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
At a January 2020 Federalist Society event, she called him “the greatest living American” because, she said, he had taken a commitment to originalism, the conservative legal philosophy, to “new heights.” She also declared with a laugh that under her interpretation of the original meaning of the Constitution, paper money is unconstitutional.
She had also previously worked on deregulatory efforts for the Trump Justice Department and, in May 2020, helped business interests argue against a proposal for mandatory federal workplace safety standards to protect workers against Covid-19 infection.
This content was originally published here.
