This is an opinion column
President Joe Biden doesn’t have the legislative authority to force millions of private-sector workers to either accept a vaccine, submit to weekly testing, or lose their jobs. In attempting to do so, Biden is doubling down on the previous administration’s petty executive branch tyranny. America shouldn’t stand for it.
Biden flat-out lied about mandating the COVID-19 vaccine. “No — I don’t think it should be mandatory,” he said in December of 2020. “I wouldn’t demand it to be mandatory.”
Now he’s mandating the vaccine, without a regular testing opt-out, for federal employees and contractors. Not only has Biden been dishonest, but he’s also stretching his authority much further than he’s entitled.
To put it bluntly, presidents aren’t kings. They can’t just do whatever they want regardless of how noble or reasonable their intentions happen to be.
The vaccine mandate for federal employees and contractors is constitutional because the president, as the head of the executive branch, has tremendous latitude regarding the employment conditions for the federal workforce. The Constitution gives him that charge as well as various statutes. In a bit of irony, federal employee unions, usually allied with Democrats, pose the most significant threat to those mandates with their collective bargaining and political power.
Biden also wants to extend the reach of the federal government even further into the private sector by mandating vaccine and testing requirements for employers of 100 or more. This is the mandate that Americans should fight tooth and nail.
Yes, laws requiring vaccines are generally constitutional. Don’t get distracted by that. Just because a law would be constitutional doesn’t mean that Congress has created it and given power to the president to enforce it.
Biden doesn’t have broad authority from Congress to mandate vaccines. The closest law he could find is the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 (OSH Act). He’s behaving as if Congress meant the OSH Act to address vaccine mandates. That is a massively expansive reading of the statute. In this case, the means do not justify what is clearly the well-intentioned end of stopping COVID-19.
Biden intends to develop an Emergency Temporary Standard which essentially expedites regulation for six months while the normal regulatory process takes place. The OSH Act gives the federal government the authority to craft an “occupational safety and health standard” defined as “a standard which requires conditions, or the adoption or use of one or more practices, means, methods, operations, or processes, reasonably necessary or appropriate to provide safe or healthful employment.”
A COVID-19 testing standard for the workplace is well within the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) authority. In contrast, an individual…
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