Another federal judge, another nail in the coffin for mandatory vaccinations ordered by the government. This time, it’s federal workers who have been freed of the requirement to be vaccinated in order to be employed by Uncle Sam.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown in Texas, an appointee of Donald Trump, said that Biden didn’t have the broad, unilateral authority to mandate “that all federal employees consent to vaccination against Covid-19 or lose their jobs.”
The judge’s ruling Friday said that the case wasn’t about whether people should be vaccinated.
“It is instead about whether the President can, with the stroke of a pen and without the input of Congress, require millions of federal employees to undergo a medical procedure as a condition of their employment,” Judge Brown, an appointee of former President Donald Trump who is based in Galveston, wrote. “That, under the current state of the law as just recently expressed by the Supreme Court, is a bridge too far.”
In effect, the judge buried the Democratic talking point that if you oppose the mandate, you are anti-vax.
The Justice Department said it was filing an appeal. White House press secretary Jen Psaki noted that 98% of federal workers are vaccinated and referred additional questions to the Justice Department. “Obviously we are confident in our legal authority here,” Ms. Psaki said.
How confident in their legal authority can they be after losing at every level of the judiciary — from state court to appeals courts to the Supreme Court?
It’s not “confident.” It’s delusional.
“Today’s decision by Judge Brown is a victory for the thousands of men and women who want to serve their government without sacrificing their individual rights,” said Marcus Thornton, president of Feds for Medical Freedom, a newly launched anti-vaccination-mandate group that challenged Mr. Biden’s executive order. Mr. Thornton works as a political officer at the State Department, according to the organization.
About the only mandate that hasn’t been adjudicated is the rule for federal contractors and their employees. Those cases are still being litigated.
The Biden administration cited several statutes to support their case including a law that says the executive “may prescribe regulations for the conduct of employees in the executive branch.” It also contended that the Constitution gave the president inherent authority to set internal employment policy for the executive branch.
Judge Brown rejected all of those arguments, saying the Biden administration pointed to no example of a previous president invoking the power to impose medical procedures on civilian federal employees.
The judge, citing the Supreme Court’s recent rulings, said the president, without express congressional authorization, was trying to regulate federal employee conduct beyond the context of the workplace, stretching his authority too far.
“The government has offered no answer—no limiting principle to the reach of the power they insist the President enjoys,” Judge Brown wrote. “For its part, this court will say only this: however extensive that power is, the federal-worker mandate exceeds it.”
Maybe if the president had spent the last few months encouraging people to get vaccinated rather than trashing and humiliating the unvaccinated and developing unnecessary punitive measures as an incentive to get jabbed, he wouldn’t have felt it necessary to force people to get vaccinated.
Now Biden has nowhere to go. He has lost all credibility in his response to the pandemic and his policy to “end this” is in tatters. There will be other variants, some of which will almost certainly be deadlier than omicron. But Biden has expended any crisis capital he had at the start of his term, and for that reason, no one is listening.
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