Welcome to Beg to B featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum from center left to

center right. I'm Mona Charon, syndicated columnist and policy editor at the

Bullwork and I'm joined by our regulars Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution and the Wall Street Journal,

Damon Linker of the Week, and Linda Chavez of the Niskanin Center.

Our special guest this week is Nicholas Grossman, political science professor, the University of Illinois, and senior editor of Arc Digital.

And we're going to begin today's discussion with masking. This week the administration extended the timetable

for when masks would be required on public transportation and suddenly a federal district judge in Florida

issued a ruling saying it cannot stand and so she issued a nationwide

injunction and suddenly everywhere all at once everybody was taking

off their masks on airplanes and trains and buses and subways and so forth. But now the administration says they're going to contest this. They are

going to challenge it. It was very unclear at first. Damon I'm going to start with

you. It looked like for a few minutes there this week that the

administration was almost looking for an excuse to just let this lapse and

that they weren't going to challenge this newly appointed judge under the Trump administration,

should be said. But then now they are. So things are thrown into confusion once more.

Yeah, I don't have a firm sense of how long this process is likely to take.

I guess it'll depend on the courts to some degree

till we get a more firm ruling on this but I think it's still

possible that the Biden administration is sort of going through the motions

here feeling like it needs to do due diligence because the ruling from the judge did not appear to be an especially thoughtful one in my opinion.

It was one of these things where I thought well that looks sort of arbitrary but then again are you referring to her discussion of the word sanitize, went on for pages and pages.

Yeah, I don't know where a lot of that comes from.

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