January 14, 2022

Supreme Court on Vaccine Rules

Editor's Note: We’re taking a brief hiatus in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day; we’ll be back in full swing Tuesday morning. Have a great holiday weekend!

“The Supreme Court on Thursday put the Biden administration’s vaccine-or-test mandate for large employers on hold, while litigation over its legality continues in the lower courts. Over a dissent from the court’s three liberal justices, the court ruled that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration exceeded its power in issuing the mandate. Congress may have given OSHA the power to regulate workplace dangers, the court explained, but it ‘has not given that agency the power to regulate public health more broadly.’ At the same time, the justices – by a vote of 5-4 – granted the administration’s request to be allowed to temporarily enforce a vaccine mandate for health care workers at facilities that receive federal funding.” SCOTUSblog

See past issues

From the Right

The right generally supports the rulings, arguing that OSHA exceeded its authority.

From the Left

The left criticizes the main ruling, arguing that OSHA acted within its mandate.

The left criticizes the main ruling, arguing that OSHA acted within its mandate.

A libertarian's take

“In the end, the five-month saga of Biden's private-employer vaccine mandate highlighted just about all of the major problems with how the federal government operates these days. Here was a major policy change implemented not by the legitimate legislative authority (Congress) but by the executive branch, which increasingly sees its authority as covering anything that's not been explicitly forbidden. Congress then stood by and waited for the Supreme Court to invalidate the order, effectively forcing nine legal scholars to do its job…

“The outcome is the right one—Biden's order was a breathtaking overreach of federal power into the affairs of private individuals and businesses—but this is, to paraphrase Kavanaugh, not how the everyday exercise of government should work.”
Eric Boehm, Reason