Supreme Court Oral Arguments Begin In Challenge Against Biden’s Vaccine Mandate

The United States Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Friday in a case challenging the Biden administration’s federal COVID-19 vaccine or test mandate for employers with more than 100 employees. In 2021, The Daily Wire was the first major business to file suit against that mandate, followed by several other petitioners, challenging the Biden administration’s use of Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to carry out the order, arguing that it was a violation of the constitution and that the mandate is not necessary to protect workers. The case has since been consolidated.

As covered on The Daily Wire’s “Morning Wire” podcast, the case was first stayed by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and the 6th Circuit lifted that stay.

Immediately after that ruling, attorneys for The Daily Wire petitioned SCOTUS to hear the case.

“We are confident in our cause. We have the rule of law – administrative and constitutional – on our side. We have the science on our side,” The Daily Wire’s co-CEO Jeremy Boreing said in an op-ed.” We have the best and most moral arguments on our side. If the Supreme Court will hear our case, we will win. If they won’t, it won’t just be a loss for us at The Daily Wire, but for all Americans. It’s hard to claim to be a free country when you can force businesses to force their employees to either violate their own consciences and inject themselves with drugs they do not wish to take, be discriminated against, or be fired.”

“At the end of the day, the government has the POWER to make us all comply, but they do not have the RIGHT to make us all comply. That’s why we must keep fighting,” he added.

Now, SCOTUS is set to hear the case on an expedited schedule, limiting the argument time to one hour and choosing two representative petitioners to argue. “Those were a coalition of 28 states including Ohio, Florida, Texas, and Tennessee, and a coalition of businesses called the National Federation of Independent Business,” Morning Wire added.

The OSHA mandate is scheduled to go into effect on January 10th with enforcement beginning February 9th. It is expected that a decision could come before Monday. Morning Wire also reported there are several avenues that the SCOTUS could take to rule the mandate unconstitutional:

There are many constitutional and statutory reasons the Court could grant a stay. The petitioners will argue that this mandate is not “necessary” to protect workers from a “grave danger.” There will likely be some back and forth on the meaning of the word “necessary,” and whether unvaccinated workers are the kind of “grave danger” from which Congress was trying to protect workers when it passed the OSHA Act. 

Another avenue the Court could take is the Major Questions Doctrine, which requires agencies making decisions of “vast economic and political significance” to have specific and clear direction from Congress itself before implementing such a policy. The argument is that Congress created OSHA to protect workers but never specifically told OSHA it could essentially shut people out of the workforce if they don’t take a vaccine.

As of press time, oral arguments were underway before SCOTUS.

Clarification: Daily Wire is one of several entities suing the Biden administration over the OSHA mandate, and was the first to file in the sixth circuit.