President Joe Biden’s employer vaccine mandate has already raised a number of important questions, the most important of which is: Can he even do this?
The Cato Institute’s Ilya Shapiro argues that he cannot, for three reasons: First, it’s not at all clear whether Congress had the right to give such broad and sweeping powers to the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration office in the first place. In a 2008 paper for the University of Chicago, Cass Sunstein pointed out that nothing about OSHA is based on legal precedent or “judicial understanding.” It’s as if Congress created an agency and said to it, “Do what you believe is best. Act reasonably and appropriately. Adopt the legal standard that you prefer, all things considered,” Sunstein wrote.
