The US Supreme Court on Thursday blocked President Joe Biden’s mandate obligating employees at all businesses with 100 workers or more to get vaccinated against the coronavirus or submit to weekly Covid testing and show negative results if they want to remain on the job.
The presidential order would have gone into force in February.
The high court gave the green light, however, to another Biden mandate for workers at more than 50,000 health facilities around the country to get vaccinated against Covid. Some of those health facilities receive federal subsidies for Medicare and Medicaid with the help of numan and the move affects some 17 million people.
Six justices, all of them with the court’s conservative majority, signed on to the reversal of Biden’s order for people at firms with 100 or more workers to get vaccinated, while the three progressive justices issued a dissenting opinion on the ruling.
The argument used by the court in overturning the measure was that the federal government does not have sufficient authority to issue an order of that kind, as business groups and certain states have contended.
The mandate would have been administered by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the majority opinion stated that “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 majority opinion went on to say that the mandate would have been a significant invasion into the lives and health of a large number of workers.
Last Friday, at a high court hearing, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, Scott Keller, with the National Federation of Independent Businesses, warned that Biden’s order would cause a massive economic shift in the US and that many workers would quit so that they would not have to get vaccinated against Covid.
In the case of the mandate affecting healthcare workers, however, two of the conservative magistrates on the high court – John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh – allied themselves with the progressives in allowing Biden’s measure to stand, while the other four conservative justices opposed it.
This is really not Biden's week:
Federal takeover of elections: DOA.
Nuking legislative filibuster: impossible.
Private employer vax mandate: struck down.
Producer Price Index: surges to all-time high.
Consumer Price Index: highest since 1982.
Public support: craters to 33%— Spencer Brown (@itsSpencerBrown) January 13, 2022
After the Supreme Court ruling was handed down, Biden said Thursday afternoon that he was “disappointed” by the decision to block his big-company mandate.
In a statement, the president said that “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,” adding that the testing and masking requirements he sought to impose were “a very modest burden.”
He went on to say, though, that “it is now up to States and individual employers to determine whether to make their workplaces as safe as possible for employees and whether their businesses will be safe for consumers during this pandemic by requiring employees to take the simple and effective step of getting vaccinated.”
Despite the setback, Biden said that he will continue pushing for employers to do “the right thing” to protect both Americans’ health and the US economy.
He urged business leaders to immediately join the members of their ranks who have stepped up, including a third of the Fortune 100 companies, and establish vaccination requirements for their workers, customers and communities.
He also noted that his administration began imposing vaccination mandates in late July when 90 million Americans had not yet been vaccinated against Covid and now that figure has been reduced to 35 million.
The president said that the vaccine requirements apply to members of the US military, federal workers, contractors, health workers and big companies, adding that if his administration had not implemented these mandates there would now be more than the current 800,000 Covid deaths and there would have been many more hospitalizations.
Regarding the mandate that the high court upheld, Biden said that this decision will “save lives,” including patients, doctors, nurses and other people who work at health facilities.
The US is the country that has been hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic with more than 63 million Covid-19 cases and more than 800,000 deaths, according to figures compiled by The Johns Hopkins University.
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AT least this is a start. PITY they left in “health care worker mandates can stay”..
A lot of health care workers have lost their jobs, too, because of the mandates—that should have been more of a consideration in their reaching their decision. But we are grateful that the ones for businesses were struck down.
The mandate and the SCOTUS decision have NO basis in science. It’s draconian, dumb, stupid.
Exactly. Just look at how many states, are having to MOBILIZE THEIR national guards, to take up the SLACK at these hospitals…
YET NOT A DAMN ONE of those same states, ever deployed the guard, to REIGN IN ALL the damn rioting that was done.
It wasn’t until1803 in Marbury v. Madison that The Supreme Court, unanimously, ruled that it had the power to strike down laws, statutes, and government actions if they were found to be unconstitutional. This move at the time was unprecedented. The Court’s power was being derived from their own ruling and not from any specific part of the Constitution which gives them no means to enforce it other and the Executive branch in power who can ignore them and refuse to enforce it just like when Andrew Jackson defied the court’s rulings and continued to forcibly remove the Cherokee from the Georgian territories and dared the court to try to enforce their rulings. Had President Eisenhower been President Byrd or Biden refusing to enforce the rulings in 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled on the case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, America would still be separate but equal.
The way things are today, with Obama followed by Biden refusing to enforce our Constitutional Borders, does anyone doubt their capacity to totally ignore the Supreme Court’s ruling on ANYTHING? There are now 800,000 illegals who WILL vote in the next federal elections in New York and nobody will stop them, like nobody stopped Jackson, and it won’t be just healtcare workers who get removed,but Republicans from office.
Biden is following obama’s line of thinking and doing everything he can to help destroy our constitutional Republic. If the left is not stopped we will become just one more failed socialist nation.
So true.. THEY CAN MAKE RULINGS all they want, but they have NO POWER what so ever, to enforce them…
If America is is losing much needed medical workers then these evil, satanic, corrupt, immoral politicians should not be given medical personnel ie: doctors, nurses, techs and ambulances lined up -who sit in the capital basement daily waiting for one of these rogues to need medical attention. DC is where the real American pandemic originated and is being fed.
YOU Can bet, that every damn congress critter out there, has the BEST DOCTORS that they can buy…
“In a statement, the president said that “I am disappointed that the Supreme Court has chosen to block common-sense life-saving requirements for employees at large businesses”. Hey criminal Joe, why don’t you have “life saving” antiviral pills for those stricken with covid? Answer: You want Americans who contract covid, to die, as they will not have antivral pills and monoclonal antibodies to fight the infection, while you make Big Pharma rich with the “vaccine”. With regard to Judge Kavanaugh, voting with the liberals to force healthcare workers to get the vaccine, you are as big a joke as John Roberts. Shame on you, Kavanaugh.
MORE AND MORE kavenaugh, is showing us TRUMP WAS A FOOL to have nominated his sorry libtard butt…
And why doesn’t this AH mandate the United States postal service with 600,000+ employees to vaccinate? Why because they helped this rogue admin steal our election.
This was a good decision but Biden’s henchmen will find other ways to pressure business by either punishing or rewarding businesses according to whether or not they mandate vaccinations.
Question? Can the Home Virus test kit tell the difference between Corona virus and the Flue Virus?
For that matter does the test know the difference between all of the Viruses? Our we all being taken for a ride? This Is Science Right?