A man who was thrown out of a Florida airport asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to freeze the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “unconstitutional” mask requirements for transportation.
Lucas Wall, a Washington, D.C., man who has been living with his mother in Florida, appealed to the court in a complaint that names the CDC, President Joe Biden, and several other federal agencies as defendants. Wall wrote that the mandate violates his freedom to travel, his right to due process, and states’ rights to decide their own mask requirements. He asked that the court issue an emergency injunction overriding the CDC’s order.
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Wall pointed to other court orders against other government coronavirus mandates, decisions to allow large church gatherings chief among them, and said that his desire to travel mask-free was no less important.
“This Court has issued at least five emergency injunctive orders in the past seven months unequivocally holding that governments may not restrict First Amendment rights even in the name of fighting a pandemic,” Wall wrote, asking the court to find that other constitutional rights also “can’t be suspended by the federal defendants because of COVID-19.”
Wall was ejected from the Orlando International Airport in early June for not wearing a mask. When he sued, he claimed that his generalized anxiety disorder made it impossible for him to follow the “improper, illegal, and unconstitutional” mandate. Most states at that point had already removed mask mandates, if they had them in the first place.
At the time, Wall told the Washington Examiner that he will be unable to leave his house unless the order, which applies to all forms of public transportation, is struck down. A Florida district court refused to give him an injunction, and the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to hear the case until the lower court had reached a decision.
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Last week, the Supreme Court voted narrowly to uphold a nationwide moratorium on evictions, another controversial CDC order issued during the pandemic. But Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was the decisive vote in its favor, wrote in a concurrence that he would have voted to strike the order down if it were not set to expire at the end of July.
Wall said Kavanaugh’s opinion was encouraging to him in his case against the CDC and that he took it as a sign that “there are at least five votes to strike down any pandemic order issued beyond the agency’s regulatory, legal, and constitutional authority.”
