Democrats are expected to oppose Republican-led legislation that would permanently ban mask mandates for Americans on public transposition, on airplanes, and in classrooms that are funded by taxpayer dollars.
The “Freedom to Breathe Act,” introduced by Senator JD Vance on Tuesday and co-sponsored by Sens. Josh Hawley, Eric Schmitt, and Mike Braun, seeks to bar federal bureaucrats, including the recently masked President Joe Biden, from forcing Americans to cover their faces in coming months. Before December 2024, the bill states that no cash collected from hardworking Americans by the government may be used to create or enforce forced masking.
“We tried mask mandates once in this country. They failed to control the spread of respiratory viruses, violated basic bodily freedom, and set our fellow citizens against one another,” Vance said in a statement. “This legislation will ensure that no federal bureaucracy, no commercial airline, and no public school can impose the misguided policies of the past. Democrats say they’re not going to bring back mask mandates – we’re going to hold them to their word.”
The bill is a response to the renewed push by schools, universities, businesses, hospitals, and health officials in major cities to usher in another round of Covid tyranny across the U.S. as virus cases spike.
There is overwhelming evidence that masks don’t work to stop the spread of Covid. Even the CDC admits that the cloth face coverings many Americans used to buy participation in public life over the last three years grant little protection against the virus.
Even if masks did work, as retired National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci erroneously suggested on national television over the weekend, even though he knows better, a majority of Americans confessed last year that they were unwilling to comply with authoritarian actions like universal masking again. Opposition to forced face coverings only appears to grow each time pollsters ask about it.
Despite the unpopularity of mandated masking, a senior Senate aide told The Federalist that Senate Democrats are expected to oppose the GOP legislation.
This should come as no surprise, considering the role Democrats played in prolonging the pandemic panic by enabling lockdowns, pushing for face coverings, and supporting vaccine mandates that threatened the livelihoods and jobs of millions of Americans.
