A looming legal battle over President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for larger companies will test the limits of his authority to implement sweeping COVID-19 rules, creating potential complications for a Democratic Party that has recently begun to reevaluate the politics surrounding its pandemic policies in light of last week’s electoral defeats.
The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals handed the mandate’s opponents a temporary victory on Saturday when a panel of its federal judges paused the forthcoming vaccine requirements in response to a lawsuit from a business owner and workers in Southern states.
The judges cited potential “grave statutory and constitutional issues” with the vaccine mandate in their order temporarily blocking the Biden administration’s rule.
TRUCKERS WARN ‘DISASTROUS’ MANDATE WILL WORSEN SUPPLY CHAIN CHAOS
The lawsuit was brought on behalf of Brandon Trosclair, a Louisiana business owner with a chain of 15 grocery stores across the state, as well as a handful of Texas ventilation workers employed by a company called CaptiveAire Systems. Lawyers from the Liberty Justice Center and the Pelican Institute for Public Policy, two conservative-leaning groups, represented the petitioners.
Trosclair’s grocery stores employ nearly 500 people in Louisiana, according to court filings, and his business has already struggled with worker shortages that his lawyers claim would be worsened by the vaccine mandate.
“Over the past 20 months, my employees have showed up to work and served their communities in the face of COVID and hurricanes,” Trosclair said in a statement about the lawsuit. “Now I’m being told by the government to insert myself into their private health decisions? That’s wrong and I won’t stand for it.”
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration released the details of its long-awaited vaccine rule last week, setting a date of Jan. 4 for the requirements to take full effect.
Under OSHA’s framework, employers with 100 employees or more must require their workers to get vaccinated or to submit to weekly COVID-19 testing and wear masks on the job.
Despite the federal court’s ruling over the weekend, some experts believe the rule remains on solid legal ground.
“The 5th circuit ruling gets it wrong from the start,” David Michaels, a George Washington University School of Public Health professor who led OSHA during the Obama administration, told the Washington Examiner. “The judges label the OSHA rule a mandate that raises ‘grave statutory and constitutional issues.’ It is not a mandate and the rule is clearly within OSHA authority.”
Michaels said OSHA has the authority to issue the vaccine and testing requirements because its authority includes forcing employers “to provide a workplace free of serious hazards.”
“The OSHA emergency rule is not a vaccine mandate — it is [a] straightforward OSHA requirement telling large employers to control a workplace hazard: potentially infectious workers,” he said. “This hazard can be controlled by limiting the presence in the workplace of workers who might transmit the virus by requiring that workers be vaccinated, tested weekly and wear a mask, or work at home or outside.”
Other legal experts have argued OSHA is wading beyond its purview by requiring vaccinations or testing regimens for larger workplaces.
“The purpose of the emergency temporary standard under OSHA is to protect against workplace hazards, not to enforce a vaccination directive for a disease that is present across the entire globe,” the Liberty Justice Center said of the lawsuit its lawyers are supporting. “Any attempt by the Biden Administration to empower the Department of Labor to regulate private health decisions made outside of work is well beyond its mission.”
The politics of the vaccine mandate could also pose issues for the Biden administration.
Democratic losses in Virginia, including the governor’s race and several legislative seats, have forced a reckoning within the party for its support of COVID-19-related school closures that voters signaled went on too long.
Supply chain problems have also driven up the cost of living in places where voters swung dramatically for Republicans last week, and a mandate that risks driving crucial workers from industries already hurting for labor, such as shipping companies, could worsen the outlook for Democrats even further if Biden is blamed for exacerbating the issue.
How the courts will handle the federal vaccine requirements remains unclear, however. This week’s temporary end to the mandate was preceded by other cases where judges did not stop more limited mandates from proceeding.
The Supreme Court declined in late October to block a vaccine mandate from taking effect for healthcare workers in Maine.
Conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito all dissented from the ruling, criticizing the state’s mandate for declining any exemptions to healthcare workers with religious objections to the vaccine.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
As precedent, the justices cited the high-profile Masterpiece Cakeshop v, Colorado Civil Rights Commission case from 2018, in which the court narrowly ruled in favor of a bakery that refused to make a custom wedding cake for a same-sex couple due to the baker’s religious beliefs. A majority of the justices decided that the state had discriminated against the baker’s religion, and the three conservative justices cited it as evidence that the law should protect sincerely held religious beliefs.
The justices argued that Maine unfairly denied religious exemptions to its vaccine mandate while allowing healthcare workers to seek other kinds of exemptions, such as with a note from a doctor advising against an individual getting the jab.
