Justice Dept. to appeal order voiding travel mask mandate
The Justice Department is filing an appeal seeking to overturn a judge’s order that voided the federal mask mandate on planes and trains and in travel hubs, officials said Wednesday. The notice came minutes after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asked the Justice Department to appeal the decision handed down by a federal judge in Florida earlier this week. A notice of appeal was filed in federal court in Tampa. The CDC said in a statement Wednesday that it is its “continuing assessment that at this time, an order requiring masking in the indoor transportation corridor remains necessary for the public health.” A federal judge in Florida had struck down the national mask mandate for mass transit on Monday, leading airlines and airports to swiftly repeal their requirements that passengers wear face coverings. The Transportation Security Administration said Monday that it would it will no longer enforce the mask requirement. The CDC had recently extended the mask mandate, which was set to expire Monday, until May 3 to allow more time to study the BA.2 omicron subvariant, which is now responsible for the vast majority of U.S. cases. But the court ruling Monday had put that decision on hold. The CDC said it will continue to monitor public health conditions to determine if a mandate would remain necessary. It said it believes the mandate is “a lawful order, well within CDC’s legal authority to protect public health.” Justice Department spokesman Anthony Coley said Wednesday night that the department was filing the appeal “in light of today’s assessment by the CDC that an order requiring masking in the transportation corridor remains necessary to protect the public health.” After a winter surge fueled by the omicron variant that prompted record hospitalizations, the U.S. has seen a significant drop in virus spread in recent months, leading most states and cities to drop mask mandates. But several Northeast cities have seen a rise in hospitalizations in recent weeks, leading Philadelphia to bring back its mask mandate. Republished with the permission of the Associated Press.
Deputy fired, another disciplined for no masks on airplane
An Alabama sheriff’s office says a deputy is out of a job and another has been disciplined for refusing to wear face masks on an airplane. Police said they received a call about unruly passengers on a Feb. 26 flight headed to Tampa, Florida, from the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport, WAAY-TV reported. Four people were drunk and not wearing masks. The flight was forced to deplane before takeoff because the rowdy passengers wouldn’t wear masks, as required by Transportation Security Administration policy. Two of the four identified themselves as off-duty law enforcement officers and were later confirmed to be Morgan County deputies. Birmingham police said one of the deputies started swearing at officers. The group wasn’t arrested, but they weren’t allowed back on the flight. Turk Jones told the station that he wouldn’t give a statement under the advice of his lawyers but said he could be identified as the deputy who was terminated. The other, whose name hasn’t been released, still works for the sheriff’s office but has been disciplined. “Our team, like everyone else, still relies on people, which can make mistakes,” Morgan County Sheriff Ron Puckett said in a statement. “However, we are still responsible for our actions. Our agency apologizes to the Birmingham Police Department, Southwest Airlines, and the passengers on that flight for this off-duty incident.” Republished with the permission of the Associated Press.
Mike Rogers’ legislation to help keep Americans safer passes House
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) would be directed to establish a working group to determine ways to develop a decentralized domestic canine breeding network to produce and train bomb-sniffing dogs under a bill introduced by Alabama 3rd District U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers that passed the House on Tuesday. H.R. 4577, the Domestic Explosives Detection Canine Capacity Building Act of 2017, would direct the TSA to build relationships with domestic breeders, private sector industry, leading veterinarians and academics with first-hand knowledge to establish breeding standards, as well as future canine procurement, based on the most up-to-date canine science. “I have long advocated for the use of canines in transportation security. These canines are more efficient than any machine and more cost-effective,” said Rogers, a senior member of the House Homeland Security Committee. “With the rise of ISIS-inspired attacks around the world on soft targets, these canines are stretched to their limits. It is past time for DHS to work with American breeders as well as the private sector to increase the volume of these animals that are available.” Rogers concluded, “The passage of my legislation in the House today marks another step forward in protecting Americans.” Currently, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secures most of its canines from vendors in Europe with just a few hundred coming from the U.S. This is due, in part, to private sector American canine breeders and vendors not having the resources to navigate DHS’ arcane procurement rules. According to Rogers, it is common-sense to create these high standards to produce world-class detection canines in the U.S.
Martin Dyckman: By electing pro-gun politicians, we are allies of home-grown terrorists
What fools we are. What willful, stubborn, persistent, incurable fools. Americans submit by the millions to the Transportation Security Administration’s multiple indignities and inconveniences. The TSA will cost us $5.1 billion this year. We’ll fill its trash barrels with tons of cosmetics, lotions and bottled water that we can’t carry on board. This is in the hope of preventing terrorists from committing more mass murders, such as those of September 11, 2001. And there haven’t been any more in that manner. But that guards only one gate, while leaving another gaping. Even as you next pose like a prisoner with arms raised or stand still for a TSA officer to wand you, some terrorist with massacre in mind could be walking into any gun shop and walking out with the means to carry it out. That’s what Omar Mateen did last week in Florida, where no permit is needed to buy or possess any firearm other than a machine gun. Florida allows even an AR-15 or its equivalent. Such weapons were invented for use in war, not self-defense. They fire as rapidly as a finger can pull a trigger. With a technique called bump fire, a trained shooter supposedly can achieve a rate of 700 rounds per minute. And so Florida is now the site of America’s worst mass shooting, with 49 innocent people dead and 53 others wounded, many grievously, at an Orlando night club named Pulse. Mateen appears to have been the most dangerous type of terrorist — homegrown, out of sight of any border control, virtually undetectable. And yet, there were warnings. His employer, a British-based security firm whose clients include the U.S. government, reportedly was told, according to The New York Times, that he spoke racial, ethnic and sexist slurs and talked about killing people. The FBI looked into him twice. Whether there was negligence is an appropriate question for investigation. The bigger question, though, is how many more Americans must die en masse, in nightclubs and restaurants and movie theaters and churches and schools, in as few seconds as it takes to read the sentence, before we learn to prohibit the sale and possession of such weapons of mass destruction? How many more terrorists will we arm? Predictably, of course, Donald Trump right away scapegoated the entire Muslim community, asserting without a shred of evidence that someone must have known what Mateen intended. In fact, most of the victims of mass shootings in the United States — 621 dead, 594 injured since 1982, according to Mother Jones — were killed by non-Muslims. Do we blame Christianity for Charleston, Virginia Tech, or for Newtown, Aurora, and Columbine? Or for the bombings and shootings, some fatal, at abortion clinics? Radicalism exists in nearly every religious faith and is the enemy of them all. Right after the San Bernardino massacre, the Senate voted 45-54 against prohibiting persons on the terrorism watch list from buying firearms. If the list is faulty, as some senators objected, it should be fixed. But as of now, there can be no confidence that someone on that list won’t be the next mass murderer. We’ll hear the gun lobby, doubtlessly, argue yet again that the best defense — the only defense — against the consequences of its insane demands is for everyone to have guns everywhere. Now suppose that half the people in that crowded, dimly lighted club had weapons when the shooting began. Think about it. Many more than 49 innocent people would be dead. Even when highly trained police stormed the scene, they couldn’t be sure that Mateen would be the only fatality. Someone posted to Facebook the other day that the NRA is America’s ISIS. Not so. The NRA does not set out to massacre innocent people. But the NRA and its associates in the gun lobby are indeed the allies of ISIS and of every other terrorist individual or organization, whatever its roots, where hatred is harbored against Americans because of their faiths, their origins, their race, or their nationality, or where mental illness inspires inchoate rage. And we — you and I, fellow citizens, are also terrorism’s allies, however unwilling or unwitting me may believe we are. We are terrorism’s allies so long as we submit to electing people to public office who are so stupid, selfish and cowardly that they would rather enact the insanities of the gun lobby than take reasonable and necessary steps to avert mass murder. There is no sound reason why any private citizen needs semi-automatic weapons, especially not AR-15s. Their possession and sale should be criminalized, except perhaps for gun clubs where the weapons would not be allowed off the premises. For a fraction of what the TSA is costing, we could buy back every such weapon and pay the owners a bonus for their troubles. The Second Amendment, of which the Supreme Court and the gun lobby have such a distorted view, was written in an age when no firearm on earth could be discharged more than three or four times a minute. Time and technology have rendered the gun lobby’s interpretation functionally obsolete. How many more Americans must be slaughtered before we, and our politicians, face that fact? ___ Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the newspaper now known as the Tampa Bay Times. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina.
Mike Rogers calls for end of TSA bureaucracy
Little over 24 hours after it was announced top Transportation Security Administration (TSA) official Kelly Hoggan was removed from his position in wake of congressional scrutiny earlier this month, the oft-maligned agency found itself the focus of yet another congressional hearing. On Tuesday, the House Homeland Security Committee held a full committee hearing titled, “Long Lines, Short Patience: The TSA Airport Screening Experience,” where Members of Congress questioned the TSA’s ability to maintain security while meeting summer travel challenges. With approximately 220 million passengers expected to pass through security checkpoints during peak travel season this summer, aviation stakeholders remain concerned that TSA’s staffing challenges will cause very long lines and wait times. At the hearing, Alabama Republican and senior member of the Homeland Security Committee U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers (AL-03) pressed TSA Administrator Peter Neffenger on the bloated bureaucracy the TSA has become. “With Memorial Day approaching, one of the busiest travel times of the year, and the recent news reports of the never-ending lines at TSA screening points at airports across the country, it is past time another option is on the table to take the place of the current TSA screeners,” Rogers said. “As I told Administrator Neffenger in the hearing today, I will soon be introducing legislation that will allow airports to end the federal screening workforce, replacing them with qualified private contractors,” continued Rogers. “This will allow TSA to work directly with its stakeholders on technology and information-sharing while being focused on the real threats to our transportation systems. We have dealt with the ‘Thousands Standing Around’ worker attitude for far too long and we must make the screening process more efficient and customer-focused. My legislation should help make the TSA smarter and leaner.”
