House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s latest push to bring back the House mask mandate has been rife with hiccups from the start, and the issues only became more severe on Thursday,
Pelosi had, at one point, appeared to command that the Capitol Police start arresting anyone who defied her orders to be masked within the Capitol. The agency then released a statement that suggested that no one was going to be arrested for violations of the rule, embarrassing Pelosi in the process.
Now, in an act of defiance that reeks of Ivy League privilege, some Republican staffers defied Pelosi’s mandate by smoking cigars and playing beer pong in the halls of government.
Hard to show the full scope because it’s a tight space and there are a bunch of people, but it’s about a hundred staff crammed together in a narrow hallway on second floor of Rayburn, almost all unmasked. They’re playing water pong, they have corn hole, I even smelled a cigar. pic.twitter.com/g2Q68SUVFs
— Aaron Fritschner (@Fritschner) July 29, 2021
https://twitter.com/Fritschner/status/1420879834968899591
Pelosi’s reintroduction of the mask rules came in response to an uptick in COVID cases throughout the nation, thanks to the new “delta” variant of the virus.
