Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) endorsed mask mandates for two-year-olds in remarks on the House floor on Wednesday, cautioning toddlers should have been “required” to mask up as coronavirus spread across the country.
He further declared parents who refused to do so engaged in “child abuse.”
“Two-year-olds should have been required to wear masks,” Nadler said. “It would be child abuse for parents not to do that because there was no vaccination available for two-year-olds.”
Nadler offered no medical or scientific research to support his argument.
He spoke after Rep. Chip Roy (R -Texas) challenged Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra for “fumbling” his response as to whether toddlers should have been masked during the pandemic.
Roy was using the example to argue for an amendment to require congressional consent before the federal government institutes a mask mandate similar to the one President Joe Biden supported for school children, as Breitbart News reported.
“We watched Secretary Becerra fumbling yesterday … unable to answer the question, ‘Can you tell me, sir, whether or not it was any benefit whatsoever for two-year-old kids to be forced to wear masks?'” Roy said on the floor. “He refused to answer the question in committee because he knew full well he has no good answer to that question.”
Fox News reports Nadler’s masking edict took further criticism from those across the aisle, including Roy, who turned on the long serving New York lawmaker’s for his comments.
“I want everybody in America to understand what they just heard from the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee in the United States House of Representatives,” Roy said. “Your 2-year-old should be forced to be masked. That is what the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee just said here on the floor of the House of Representatives. That the power of the government, the full power of the federal government, should be a part of ensuring and enforcing your children, your 2-year-old child to be masked.”
Social media showed the push back from general members of the public as well.
Masks became compulsory in most U.S. states in the months after the coronavirus pandemic first began in March/April 2020.
By November U.S. governors had imposed state and regional mask mandates that had been in effect for months in 32 states, as Breitbart News reported.
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