The Daily Wire appealed to the Supreme Court Monday its case against President Joe Biden’s vaccine order for private businesses.
The Daily Wire asked the Supreme Court to issue an emergency stay against Biden’s vaccine order, which would force large private employers to vaccinate or regularly COVID-19 test their employees. Last week, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals lifted a stay placed on Biden’s order by the Fifth Circuit.
The Daily Wire, which sued the Biden administration over its vaccine order in November, also asked the Supreme Court to consider taking up the case, which would move the legal battle between The Daily Wire and the Biden administration out of the Sixth Circuit and into the Supreme Court.
The filing asks the Supreme Court to block the Biden administration from enforcing its order while the legal questions surrounding the controversial rule are decided in the courts.
“The Daily Wire requests that the Supreme Court order the stay of the implementation of OSHA’s ETS pending review, or grant certiorari and a stay before judgment pending resolution on the merits,” the filing says.
Daily Wire co-founder and co-CEO Jeremy Boreing announced the appeal to the Supreme Court on Monday.
“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. We have the best and most moral arguments on our side,” he said. “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.”
The Sixth Circuit lifted a stay on the Biden administration’s order on Friday, delivering a blow to The Daily Wire and numerous other litigants who have challenged the federal rule on constitutional and administrative grounds.
“Recognizing that the ‘old normal’ is not going to return, employers and employees have sought new models for a workplace that will protect the safety and health of employees who earn their living there,” Judge Jane Branstetter Stranch wrote in the court’s decision. “In need of guidance on how to protect their employees from COVID-19 transmission while reopening business, employers turned to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.”
The Sixth Circuit’s decision followed an earlier vote that denied The Daily Wire’s petition to hear the case en banc, or in front of the full slate of Sixth Circuit judges. The petition was denied in an 8-8 vote after which the court’s chief judge, Jeffrey Sutton, slammed the Biden admin rule in a lengthy dissent from the court’s decision. Sutton wrote in part:
It is one thing to tell a worker to don a mask at the start of a hazard-filled shift and doff it at the end. It is quite another to tell a worker to vaccinate on the basis of a risk that exists whether he is on the clock or off and that amounts to a medical procedure that cannot be removed at the end of the shift. Confirming the point, the Secretary of Labor has never imposed a vaccine mandate or for that matter a vaccinate-or-test mandate on American workers. The [Occupational Safety and Health Act] does not clearly give the Secretary power to regulate all health risks and all new health hazards, largely through off-site medical procedures, so long as the individual goes to work and may face the hazard in the course of the workday.