Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) slammed the Biden administration on Thursday for its vaccine mandates, despite his own support for vaccines, noting that the mandates pose a threats to people’s jobs which in some cases pose a risk to U.S. national security.
Cruz’s remarks come after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit halted Democrat President Joe Biden’s mandate last month, citing potential “grave statutory and constitutional issues with the Mandate.”
“The Biden White House mandates have been struck down repeatedly by the courts,” Cruz told reporters on Thursday. “They are blatantly lawless. Joe Biden knows they’re lawless. His lawyers have told him that the vaccine mandates are contrary to law. And Democrats don’t care. They don’t care about medical privacy. They don’t care about individual autonomy. Instead, we have seen in the course of this pandemic, Democrats, being very comfortable with being petty tyrants and decreeing that you must obey their medical mandates.”
Cruz noted he supports vaccines and that both he and his family have been vaccinated against the coronavirus but he “also support[s] individual liberty and individual responsibility.”
“It ought to be your choice as a responsible adult to decide whether to get the COVID vaccine,” Cruz continued. “And you ought to make that discussion, that decision in consultation with your doctor. And no pissant politician — whether a local mayor, or a governor or the President of the United States — has the right or legal authority to force you to make that decision.”
“And the cynicism of the Biden White House was really underscored when their illegal vaccine mandate was enjoined by the Federal Court of Appeals and the next day, the White House press secretary’s office stood up and told Americans obey the order anyway, never mind those pesky little courts,” Cruz said. “Never mind the rule of law, never mind following a judicial order, you should obey our decree anyway. I think that is lawless. I think it’s wrong. It’s an abuse of power. It is threatening the jobs of millions of Americans from active-duty military soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines to federal civilian workers, to Border Patrol agents, to federal law enforcement to airline pilots and flight attendants to air traffic control.”
Louisiana Western District U.S. Judge Terry Doughty ordered a nationwide injunction this week against the Biden administration’s CMS Mandate for healthcare workers this week, saying, “if the separation of powers meant anything to the Constitutional framers, it meant that the three necessary ingredients to deprive a person of liberty or property – the power to make rules, to enforce them, and to judge their violations – could never fall into the same hands.”
“If the executive branch is allowed to usurp the power of the legislative branch to make laws, two of the three powers conferred by our Constitution would be in the same hands,” he added. “If human nature and history teach anything, it is that civil liberties face grave risks when governments proclaim indefinite states of emergency.”