Supreme Court Rules 6 to3 on osha Vaccine Mandate
BY CHRIS QUEEN
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
On Thursday afternoon, the Supreme Court weighed in on Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for companies with more than 100 employees. The Court ruled with a 6-3 margin to strike down the OSHA mandate for businesses with more than 100 employees, but it did allow the mandate for federally funded healthcare agencies with a 5-4 vote.
The court’s conservative majority concluded the administration overstepped its authority by seeking to impose the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s vaccine-or-test rule on U.S. businesses with at least 100 employees. More than 80 million people would have been affected.
“OSHA has never before imposed such a mandate. Nor has Congress. Indeed, although Congress has enacted significant legislation addressing the COVID–19 pandemic, it has declined to enact any measure similar to what OSHA has promulgated here,” the conservatives wrote in an unsigned opinion.
The conclusion on the per curium brief in favor of striking down the mandate concluded that OSHA’s powers are limited to regulating the workplace, yet COVID-19 affects more than just the workplace, which means that the pandemic falls outside of OSHA’s purview.
Read the full text of the Court’s per curium here.
In November, Biden ordered federal contractors, employers with 100 or more employees, and healthcare workers to force their employees to either show proof of vaccination or be tested weekly and wear masks to work. Since then, employers have been scrambling to figure out how to proceed as the deadline loomed for compliance while the issue was tied up in the courts. On Monday, the mandate officially went into effect, with no guidance from the Supreme Court on how they should proceed. Many companies felt they had no choice but to begin enforcement of the policy.
The Biden administration’s Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) cited a provision in OSHA regulations that it said gave broad authority to the federal government to protect employees at private companies from workplace hazards. Detractors said the language in the regulations was never intended to be used to mandate widespread vaccinations.
States immediately began filing lawsuits claiming the mandate was unconstitutional. A Louisiana federal court swiftly blocked the mandate. But in December, a three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that the lower court only had the authority to block the mandate in the states that had filed suit. A federal court in Texas then issued a preliminary injunction halting enforcement of the mandate for the states that filed lawsuits.
A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reinstated the vaccine mandate in mid-December, prompting a flurry of petitions to the Supreme Court for relief. The Biden administration petitioned the Supreme Court demanding a nationwide stay of the injunctions, pending a full review by the lower courts. This past Friday, the Court held an emergency hearing on the mandate for private employers as well as the one for healthcare workers.
As more details and analysis come down the line, we’ll share more with you. But in the meantime, breathe a sigh of relief that the vaccine mandate is effectively dead.
Special thanks to Paula Bolyard for her background work on this story.