Jeremy Boreing, co-founder and co-CEO of The Daily Wire, explained the company’s decision to sue the Biden administration Thursday for mandating that large companies require their employees be vaccinated or submit to regular testing.
The Dhillon Law Group, Inc. and Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) are representing The Daily Wire in the legal battle. Representatives of both nonprofit legal groups and Boreing gave a virtual press conference Thursday over the reasons for the suit, as well as the next steps.
“We’re not the enforcement arm of the federal government. Forcing Americans to choose between their livelihoods and their freedom is a grotesque abuse of power and we won’t be a party to it,” Boreing said. “We will not incur the cost of implementing this testing regime. We will not incur the liability of inserting ourselves into the private health decisions and information of our employees. Our company was founded to stand against tyranny, and we will.”
The lawsuit does not take a position on whether someone should receive the vaccine or not, only against Biden’s mandate, announced earlier this year and unveiled on Thursday morning. The mandate applies to all companies with 100 or more employees and forces those businesses to police the vaccine status of their employees. The Daily Wire, with over 100 employees, falls under the mandate.
The Daily Wire’s lawsuit seeks to overturn Biden’s executive action, arguing that the order is unconstitutional and that the Biden administration violated federal law in drafting it.
“The mandate fails to meet the requirements for issuing a rule taking effect immediately without considering the normal process of considering public comment. We are no longer in a pandemic, we are in an endemic situation and there is no emergency that requires the Biden administration to skip over the normal rulemaking process to implement this radical takeover of the American workplace that is not authorized by Congress or by the Constitution,” said Harmeet Dhillon, a partner at the Dhillon Law Group.
ADF Senior Counsel Ryan Bangert added, “This lawsuit is not about whether the COVID vaccine is a good thing. People of good faith hold different views on that question, and people can, and have, decided how best to protect themselves and their families. That’s called freedom. The question is whether the federal government has the authority to strip Americans of that freedom to decide by conscripting private employers like The Daily Wire to become the government’s COVID vaccine commissars. The answer to that is straightforward: no.”
“Corporations and states have certain responsibilities because we have the means to engage in this battle,” Boreing said. “We read story after story of individuals trying to make a stand. Of course, those individuals lose their jobs. They don’t have a way to make a stand against the government itself, so instead they make a stand against their employer and they suffer for it. Only the corporations themselves and the states, I think, can take an action that has the sort of collective power necessary to make a change.”
Boreing later explained why The Daily Wire, as a business, is particularly interested in fighting the mandate. The co-founder explained that his company had a corporate responsibility to push back against the Biden administration’s invasive order. The Daily Wire also needed to look out for its own interests by refusing to take on the liability of policing its employees’ health care decisions.
“We should be clear about what the government is asking us to do: discriminate against our own employees on the basis of their private health care decisions,” Boreing said. “They act with such hubris and we’re left to pick up those pieces. It’s not our place to even know the private health care decisions of our employees, much less to discriminate against them on the basis of those decisions. And I don’t see how the government can rightly put those liabilities on us into the future.”
The Daily Wire co-CEO said that the costs incurred by businesses forced to regulate employees who do not take the vaccine create a jumble of potential legal problems should an unvaccinated employee need to be let go. With the added cost to the company of being unvaccinated, the employee, no matter the reason for their termination, could potentially claim that they were cut from the company for costing more money over their personal health care decisions.
“Even businesses that may not share our philosophical or ideological view of the problem, I think, should be taking a hard look at what kind of liabilities they are incurring because of a rule that’s forcing them to discriminate against their employees on the basis of very private decisions made by those employees,” Boreing said.