Posted on by Doug Santo

Democrats are worried that Covid will go away. They seem convinced that their political fortunes are tied to the disease.

I believe the 2 months or so between the Biden announcement of the mandate and the OSHA issuance of the mandate were to allow pre-issuance coercion of big business to comply with the mandate. Biden must have been advised that within a week of mandate issuance he would be sued by multiple parties and that the plaintiffs would have an excellent chance at prevailing in the courts. The delay between announcement and issuance was to get some compliance before being shut down. The statement that business should comply despite the court stay is an indication of ideological control of administration policy by far-left bureaucrats. Similar bureaucratic control was on display recently when Biden denied huge payouts to illegal aliens and quickly reversed himself. This administration will be shown by history to be one of the most ideologically driven in the history of our great country. The reason the ideologues have so much sway is the obvious weakness, physical and mental, of the president and his inability to exercise control of his own government.

Related:

Here Are the Arguments That Persuaded the 5th Circuit To Block OSHA’s Vaccine Mandate for Private Employers

Here is a brief excerpt. Much more at the link.

“…The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit yesterday stayed the Biden administration’s brand-new COVID-19 vaccine mandate for private employers, which took effect on Friday, when it was published in the Federal Register. The appeals court said the arguments made by the petitioners—a Louisiana supermarket chain and six employees of a Texas company that makes kitchen ventilation systems—”give cause to believe there are grave statutory and constitutional issues with the Mandate.”

The vaccine rule, which was announced in early September but was not unveiled until last Thursday, gives businesses with 100 or more employees two options: They can adopt a “mandatory vaccination policy” with limited exceptions, or they can require unvaccinated employees to wear face masks and undergo weekly COVID-19 testing. The White House described the mandate as part of a broader effort to boost the nationwide vaccination rate. The aim, it said, is to “reduce the number of unvaccinated Americans by using regulatory powers and other actions to substantially increase the number of Americans covered by vaccination requirements.”

But the federal government has no general authority to protect public health, control communicable diseases, or require vaccination, all of which are primarily state responsibilities. The administration therefore presented the vaccine mandate as an “emergency temporary standard” (ETS) issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which is charged specifically with protecting employees from workplace hazards. As the 5th Circuit indicated, that legal strategy leaves the mandate open to challenge on both statutory and constitutional grounds.

The plaintiffs in BST Holdings v. OSHA, who are represented by the Chicago-based Liberty Justice Center and Louisiana’s Pelican Institute for Public Policy, argue that the ETS exceeds the agency’s authority under the Occupational Safety and Health Act. Even if it didn’t, they say, empowering OSHA to issue such a sweeping order would exceed the federal government’s power to regulate interstate commerce and violate the nondelegation doctrine, which constrains lawmaking by executive agencies…”

Doug Santo