In a 6-3 decision Thursday, the Supreme Court blocked the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate forcing private businesses to require employees to get the experimental COVID vaccinations. At the same time, the Court ruled that the Biden regime may proceed with a vaccine mandate for most health care workers in the United States.
The OSHA rule mandated businesses with more than 100 employees to force their workers to either submit to the COVID injections, or wear masks on the job and get tested on a weekly basis.
The Court reasoned that the OSHA mandate “likely” exceeded “OSHA’s statutory authority and is otherwise unlawful.”
“OSHA has never before imposed such a mandate. Nor has Congress. Indeed, although Congress has enacted significant legislation addressing the COVID–19 pandemic, it has declined to enact any measure similar to what OSHA has promulgated here,” the six conservatives wrote in their opinion.
“The Court rightly applies the major questions doctrine and concludes that this lone statutory subsection does not clearly authorize OSHA’s mandate,” the conservative justices added.
“Historically, such matters have been regulated at the state level by authorities who enjoy broader and more general governmental powers. Meanwhile, at the federal level, OSHA arguably is not even the agency most associated with public health regulation. And in the rare instances when Congress has sought to mandate vaccinations, it has done so expressly. We have nothing like that here.”
In dissent, the court’s three liberals, Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, argued: “Acting outside of its competence and without legal basis, the Court displaces the judgments of the Government officials given the responsibility to respond to workplace health emergencies.”
The court also ruled in a 5-4 decision that the Biden Regime’s mandate requiring vaccinations for an estimated 20 million health care workers may be enforced. The mandate has exacerbated staff shortages seen in hospitals throughout the country where fully vaxxed workers are calling in sick with COVID. This mandate applies to health care providers that receive federal Medicare or Medicaid funding, affecting about 76,000 health care facilities as well as home health care providers. The mandate reportedly allows medical and religious exemptions.
Due to staffing shortages, the CDC last month issued guidelines allowing healthcare workers who have had “higher risk exposures” to COVID, and even those infected with COVID to return to work after a five day quarantine as long as they’re asymptomatic.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito noted their dissenting opinion: “The challenges posed by a global pandemic do not allow a federal agency to exercise power that Congress has not conferred upon it. At the same time, such unprecedented circumstances provide no grounds for limiting the exercise of authorities the agency has long been recognized to have.”
Joe Biden announced his plan to impose a vaccine mandate for businesses last September in a speech that was widely denounced as “tyrannical, “authoritarian,” and “un-American.”
“We’ve been patient but our patience is wearing thin and your refusal has cost all of us,” Biden said, scapegoating unvaccinated Americans.
He called the COVID crisis a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” and said, “we’re going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated coworkers.”
Biden has repeated these talking points many times over the ensuing months, even as the vaccine efficacy waned, and “breakthrough infections” became common. Even today, despite mounting evidence that the vaccines actually have “negative efficacy” against Omicron, Joe Biden repeated his “pandemic of the unvaccinated” line during speech about his strategy to combat the current surge in COVID cases.
In reaction to the Supreme Court ruling against the Osha Mandate, Biden said in a statement: “I am disappointed that the Supreme Court has chosen to block common-sense life-saving requirements for employees at large businesses that were grounded squarely in both science and the law. This emergency standard allowed employers to require vaccinations or to permit workers to refuse to be vaccinated, so long as they were tested once a week and wore a mask at work: a very modest burden.”
Biden called on business leaders across the country “to immediately join those who have already stepped up – including one third of Fortune 100 companies – and institute vaccination requirements to protect their workers, customers, and communities.”
Former president Trump issued his own response to the Court’s decision:
“The Supreme Court has spoken, confirming what we all knew: Biden’s disastrous mandates are unconstitutional. Biden promised to shut down the virus, not the economy but he has failed miserably on both—and mandates would have further destroyed the economy. We are proud of the Supreme Court for not backing down. No mandates!” Trump said in a statement Thursday afternoon.