He's calling their bluff.
“we’re going to hold them to their word.”
The senator said Democrats have signaled they’re not interested in bringing back mask rules, so “we’re going to hold them to their word.”
...is signaling that they're not interested in instituting any mask mandates for the currently circulating virus them "giving their word that they're not ever going to want to institute a public health measure"?
Combined with the fact that this proposal seems to be very narrow:
The bill would prohibit the president or any federal official from issuing a mask requirement on domestic air travel, public transit systems, or primary, secondary and postsecondary schools.
...and seems to be specifically focused on masks.
To go even further, many of the mask mandates that were in place were coming from state level governments and not federal.
All of these things would seem to point to it being a "virtue signal bill".
And I noticed he used to rather interesting language to describe it.
“We tried mask mandates once in this country. They failed to control the spread of respiratory viruses, violated basic bodily freedom and set our fellow citizens against one another,”
While the efficacy of masks can be debated in good faith (I happen to land on the side of "if you were just wearing a cloth mask or cut-up t-shirt, you weren't accomplishing much...it's N95 or nothing), that's clearly not what Vance is doing. He's attempting to link backlash and compliance refusal to a failure in efficacy.
(evaluation of the average time transmission would take in close proximity based on mask types)
As I noted before, if two people are wearing either surgical or cloth masks, the end result isn't much different than if they were wearing nothing at all. (you catch it in 26 mins instead of 20 mins...negligible)
But that's all moot if Vance is going with the angle of "mask mandates made people angry at each other" and is conflating that lack of usage with lack of efficacy.
By those standards, any public measure could be labelled as ineffective or polarizing if a large enough group of individuals themselves opt to not follow it, and get angry at the people who do.
One could say that drunk driving laws don't work by the same standard, therefore, let's scrap sobriety requirements.
To overlay his quote on this:
“We've tried sobriety requirements for driving in this country. They failed to control the issue of drunk driving, violated basic bodily freedom and set our fellow citizens against one another,”