On Tuesday, Ed Morrissey at Hot Air posted an article about a recent ruling by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The article reports:
A U.S. appeals court on Monday said the White House could not require federal contractors to ensure that their workers are vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition of government contracts.
The U.S. government has contracts with thousands of companies, and courts have said the issue could affect up to 20% of U.S. workers.
A panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to uphold a lower court decision that blocked President Joe Biden’s September 2021 contractor vaccine executive order in those states after Louisiana, Indiana, and Mississippi brought suit to seek invalidation of the mandate.
The article also notes:
It’s important to remember that this case deals with private sector employees, not federal government workers. The executive branch does have the authority to set working conditions in its own workplaces, limited by the obvious laws (the Constitution especially) and the need to work within collective-bargaining contracts. In this mandate, Biden attempted to force private-sector companies that provide goods and services to the federal government to impose vaccination requirements on their own workforces, and claimed that the Procurement Act provided Biden with that authority and jurisdiction.
The article concludes:
By the way, the court never does get to one of the core issues in this mandate — the fact that the extant vaccines neither stop transmission nor uptake. They do have a demonstrated positive effect in minimizing acute and severe cases of COVID, but that’s not the issue in workplace vaccine requirements. The only reason to impose such an order would be to stop transmission of an infectious disease, which none of the vaccines actually do. The only effect is personal and individual, and so the choice should be personal as well — just as with the tobacco analogy the Fifth Circuit wisely uses for demonstration.
The administration is fighting a battle they will lose on multiple fronts, in other words. They can appeal this to the Supreme Court, but that’s likely to deliver the same result in an ironclad historical precedent. Unlike the Academia bailout, Biden has no real political interest in fighting this out with the Supreme Court, and thus we may have seen the last of this battle.
Please follow the link to read the entire article. The arguments made on both sides are very interesting.