Joe Biden’s COVID vaccine mandate is getting killed in the courts.
This isn’t surprising one bit, and I don’t doubt for a second that the Biden administration, despite its promise to aggressively fight for the mandates in court, knew it was a fool’s errand.
In fact, a year ago, Joe Biden said he wouldn’t mandate vaccinations.
“No, I don’t think it should be mandatory. I wouldn’t demand it be mandatory,” he said. “But I would do everything in my power — just like I don’t think masks have to be made mandatory nationwide — I will do everything in my power as president of the United States to encourage people to do the right thing. And when they do it, demonstrate that it matters.”
As recently as this summer, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said that vaccine mandates are “not the role” of the federal government. “Well, I think the question here — one, that’s not the role of the federal government,” she said on July 23, offering no exception to this assessment. “That is the role that institutions, private-sector entities, and others may take. That certainly is appropriate.”
But then the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan happened, and at the end of August, Biden’s approval ratings were in free fall.
So, on Sept. 9, Biden announced that he would impose a vaccine mandate. “My job as president is to protect all Americans,” Biden said. “So tonight, I’m announcing that the Department of Labor is developing an emergency rule to require all employers with 100 or more employees that together employ over 80 million workers to ensure their workforces are fully vaccinated or show a negative test at least once a week.”
“The bottom line — we’re going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated coworkers,” he added.
Once OSHA released the guidelines, lawsuits were quickly filed… and Biden has lost them all. White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain nevertheless exuded confidence. “I’m quite confident that when this finally gets fully adjudicated, not just a temporary order, the validity of this requirement will be upheld,” Klain said on NBC’s Meet the Press last month. “If OSHA can tell people to wear a hard hat on the job, to be careful around chemicals, it could put in place these simple measures to keep our workers safe.”
Related: Judge in Georgia Blocks Biden’s Vaccine Mandate for Federal Contractors
But Klain knows that a vaccine mandate isn’t the same as requiring someone to wear a hard hat. In fact, Klain himself acknowledged that a vaccine mandate isn’t constitutional back in September when he retweeted a tweet that effectively praised Biden’s use of an OSHA rule as a workaround for enacting an unconstitutional federal mandate.
OSHA suspended enforcement of the mandate last month. But that hasn’t stopped the Biden administration from pressuring businesses to enforce it anyway. But the mandate will continue to fail in the courts. That is and always was its destiny. This fight has never been about the vaccine or COVID, but rather, it’s been a political distraction. It may have succeeded in getting Afghanistan off the front pages, but it didn’t boost his approval ratings or even stop the bleeding. In fact, polls have also shown that support for the mandate has gone down, and now more Americans believe Trump did better fighting COVID than Biden.
