Reporter, Slate
https://apple.news/Am7a_m_gxSpeJnAVpoMr-UA
The Supreme Court Had No Legal Reason to Block Biden’s Workplace Vaccine Rules
So it made one up.
JANUARY 13 2022 10:34 PM
The Supreme Court significantly hobbled—but did not obliterate—President Joe Biden’s efforts to protect Americans from COVID in the face of congressional inaction. By a 6–3 vote, the justices blocked his vaccinate-or-test mandate for large employers, accusing the administration of exceeding its authority. But by a 5–4 vote, the court upheld the administration’s vaccine mandate for health care workers, a decision that will compel more than 10 million people to get the jab. This split double header is a crushing defeat for Biden’s efforts to curb the pandemic by protecting American workers from catching COVID in the workplace. SCOTUS’ decision is not, however, a knockout blow to the administrative state. The Republican-appointed justices may yet enfeeble the executive branch’s ability to implement federal law. But a majority of them declined to seize on these cases as their vehicle.
By far the more important case, NFIB v. Department of Labor involves an “emergency temporary standard” issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. This rule required employers with 100 or more workers to give their staff a choice: either get the COVID-19 vaccine or test weekly and mask in the office. The policy would have covered roughly 84 million people. To justify this mandate, OSHA drew on a federal law that allows the agency to protect employees from a “grave danger” resulting from “physically harmful” “agents” or “new hazards.” A coalition of red states filed a lawsuit to halt OSHA’s mandate, and by a 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court took their side.
SCOTUS’ unsigned majority opinion rests on several dubious claims. The court declared that “we expect Congress to speak clearly when authorizing an agency to exercise powers of vast economic and political significance.” So even though COVID is undoubtedly a “grave danger” and a “new hazard” to workers, this broad language is not enough, because it does not “plainly authorize” the mandate. Why not? The majority invented a distinction between hazards that occur solely in the workplace and hazards that occur in and out of the workplace. Because the pandemic exists outside the workplace, it is not the kind of “grave danger” envisioned by the statute, and “falls outside OSHA’s sphere of expertise.” The majority also raised the “anti-novelty principle,” stating: “It is telling that OSHA, in its half century of existence, has never before adopted a broad public health regulation of this kind.”
Notice something unusual about this analysis? The dissenters certainly did: It is utterly untethered to the plain text of the law, which obviously encompasses OSHA’s rule. In a rare joint dissent, Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan shredded this anti-textual approach to statutory interpretation. By dismantling OSHA’s authority over hazards found in and out of the workplace, they wrote, the majority imposed “a limit found no place in the governing statute.” This limit is not even supported by history: The agency has long regulated risks “beyond the workplace walls,” including fires, excessive noise, unsafe drinking water, and faulty electrical installations. And if the vaccinate-or-test policy is unprecedented, that is because it is in response to an unprecedented event: the deadliest pandemic in American history.
If that weren’t enough, OSHA put forth uncontested evidence that COVID–19 “poses special risks in most workplaces, across the country and across industries.” The virus “spreads more widely in workplaces than in other venues because more people spend more time together there,” the dissenters noted. OSHA “backed up its conclusions with hundreds of reports of workplace COVID– 19 outbreaks.” And it issued a rule designed to protect workers from these kinds of superspreader events. By “overturning that action,” the dissenters wrote, the majority “substitutes judicial diktat for reasoned policymaking.”
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Read the complete article at the link.
Immigration practitioners are used to result-oriented, anti-immigrant, racially, ethnically, and religiously driven results from Federal Judges. After all, fewer than four years ago a somewhat different Supremes’ right-wing majority “green-lighted” Trump’s bogus invidious, unprecedented “Muslim ban” by accepting clearly pretextual and contrived rationales that actually were refuted by the lower court records.
Here, with the facts, science, and history, as well as the statute supporting the Biden Administration’s reasonable program, the GOP Justices simply invented a reason to bar Biden from taking action to protect our health and safety. Talk about a double standard!
🇺🇸Due Process Forever!
PWS
01-13-21