It was not that long ago that wearing masks in Congress was so important that Speaker Nancy Pelosi was handing out $500 fines to Republicans who refused to wear them.
And many of them gladly paid the fine. “Best $500 I ever spent,” Florida Republican Brian Mast said.
But suddenly all of that has changed.
On the Friday before President Joe Biden’s first State of the Union, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suddenly announced that it was changing its indoor mask recommendations. No longer would COVID-19 cases be the determinative metric. Instead, the CDC would take a more holistic approach that included hospitalizations and local hospital capacity.
Overnight, the percentage of counties subject to indoor mask restrictions dropped from around 90% to around 30%. And Washington, D.C., just happened to be one of the new localities where the “science” said masks were no longer needed.
By pure coincidence, earlier in the week, the Democratic polling firm Impact Research issued a memo beseeching Democrats to “declare the crisis phase of COVID over and push for feeling and acting normal.”
“Six in ten Americans describe themselves as ‘worn out’ by the pandemic,” the memo read. “The more we talk about the threat of COVID and onerously restrict people’s lives because of it, the more we turn them against us and show them we’re out of touch with their daily realities.”
Not wanting to show people they are out of touch, Pelosi ended the House’s mask mandate just one day before the State of the Union.
So if you want to know who to thank for being able to see every smiling face on Tuesday, be sure to thank Democratic pollsters and not the CDC.
