Last Call For The Vax Of Life, Con't

After temporarily blocking the Biden administration's vaccine mandate for private employers last month, the conservative 5th Circuit has now officially ruled the entire vaccine mandate unconstitutional.

A federal appeals court in New Orleans has halted the Biden administration’s vaccine or testing requirement for private businesses, delivering another political setback to one of the White House’s signature public health policies.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, helmed by one judge who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan and two others who were appointed by President Donald Trump, issued the ruling Friday, after temporarily halting the mandate last weekend in response to lawsuits filed by Republican-aligned businesses and legal groups.

Calling the requirement a “mandate,” the court said the rule, instituted through the Labor Department, “grossly exceeds OSHA’s statutory authority,” according to the opinion, written by Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt and joined by Judges Edith H. Jones and Stuart Kyle Duncan.

“Rather than a delicately handled scalpel, the Mandate is a one-size fits-all sledgehammer that makes hardly any attempt to account for differences in workplaces (and workers) that have more than a little bearing on workers’ varying degrees of susceptibility to the supposedly ‘grave danger’ the Mandate purports to address,” they wrote.

They said they believed that the ruling imposed a financial burden on businesses and potentially violated the commerce clause of the Constitution.

“The Mandate imposes a financial burden upon them by deputizing their participation in OSHA’s regulatory scheme, exposes them to severe financial risk if they refuse or fail to comply, and threatens to decimate their workforces (and business prospects) by forcing unwilling employees to take their shots, take their tests, or hit the road,” they wrote.

The New Orleans-based 5th Circuit is considered one of the country’s most conservative appeals courts.

The vaccine mandate was released by the Biden administration last week after weeks of deliberation. It says private employers with more than 100 employees must require staff to get vaccinated — or face weekly testing and mandatory masking. Workers who don’t work on-site or with others are able to be exempted.

Even though the testing option makes it softer than many of the requirements instituted by private companies and state and municipal governments, it has faced strong blowback from a chorus of conservative groups, businesses and mostly Republican officials.

The court halted the policy, scheduled to take effect Jan. 4, and ordered the Occupational Safety and Health Administration not to take further steps to implement or enforce the mandate. It is not clear whether the 5th Circuit will determine the fate of the mandate. The Biden administration had asked the 5th Circuit to hold off on ruling until a judicial lottery can take place next week to consolidate several challenges to the mandate before a single appeals court.

Federal officials spent weeks hammering out the policy, aware of the high number of legal challenges it would face but believing that the order was well within the Labor Department’s powers to keep workplaces free of “grave dangers” in times of emergency.

If the 5th Circuit is right, there's basically no government agency with the authority to regulate anything.

Which, as I said last week, is what they're going for.

Knowing that this would be the perfect case for the Federalist Society ghouls on SCOTUS to dismantle everything since the New Deal, the Justice Department says it will defend the mandate anyway.

We'll see how far it goes.  But I think by July 4th, we'll have a drastically different new legal landscape in America.