President Joe Biden’s sweeping employer vaccine mandate will almost certainly invite dozens of lawsuits from private employers and states. Regardless of whether the mandate survives the courts, there should be no question that the fact he was able to write the order in the first place is a problem.
The mandate, which requires employers with more than 100 employees to mandate either vaccination or weekly testing, will be covered under a forthcoming rule from the Labor Department and its Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Biden believes OSHA has the authority to enforce the rule under an emergency temporary standard, which would require OSHA to “determine that workers are in grave danger due to exposure to toxic substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or to new hazards and that an emergency standard is needed to protect them.”
OSHA will have to prove the coronavirus fits under this category. It’s an obvious stretch, but so was the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s eviction moratorium, which began under President Donald Trump’s administration and was finally tossed by the Supreme Court this summer.
Alas, the federal bureaucracy has asserted an enormous amount of power to issue vague and wide-ranging rules that often toe the line of what’s constitutional and what’s not. Our lawmakers are to blame: They’ve been handing their legislative responsibilities to bureaucratic agencies for years, allowing unelected bureaucrats to write and enforce the law. And for the most part, the courts have let it happen.
Which leads us to where we are now: A regulatory entity created and granted very broad powers by Congress is now trying to exert authority over private businesses, and no one can quite figure out whether it actually has the power to do so. This is just one symptom of a much larger problem in our government, and, unfortunately, it appears to be only getting worse.
